More notes from SXSW. This was a great presentation by Derek Powazek. It was fast and covered a lot so I hope my notes make sense! Fire away in the comments if you want me to clarify anything.
If you put a group of people together, they’re not necessarily smart. Our job is to enable and facilitate people so that the magic happens.
Talking about the Francis Galton experiment to guess the weight of the cow. Everyone guessed wrong, but the average of the guesses was very close.
Same is true for guess the value of the coins in the jar.
Newspaper sites with ‘most emailed stories’ facility. People make their own choices, but we get a useful insight into what are the most popular stories of the day.
P2P filesharing: A group of people create a libray of things to share. The more people that share something, you can see what’s popular and get a Top 10 list of what the best tracks are by a particular artist.
Stock market: Lots of people making small decisions that together dictate the value of companies.
So why is so much community stuff on the web dumb? See YouTube comments!
Elements of wise crowds:
Diversity – wide variey of inputs
Independent – people must be able to contribute in their own way for the own reasons (not groupthink)
Decentralisation – nobody in charge
Aggregation – all of the diverse data needs to be brought together.
For the web:
1. Small, simple tasks: i.e. not having an open free text field for people to contribute, but a more defined way to contribute. Wisdom of crowds works well when there is a specific answer that we’re looking for, not an open ended question. Examples: HotOrNot (voting whether someone’s attractive) or Threadless (voting for T-Shirt designs.) Bad example: Assignment Zero – crowdsourcing experiment to get people to contribute to creating stories, but it was too open ended. Then changed tack to creating a list of people they would like to interview and then people volunteered to do the interviews. The collective task became more manageable.
2. Given to a large diverse group: Opposite of GroupThink where decisions are made by a small clique where the priorities of the group are put before the selfish interests of the individuals. Design systems to encourage lots of people to participate. Bad example: Chevvy Tahoe experiment to allow people to create straplines for ads but people just took the piss “This asshole’s SUV”.
3. Design for selfishness: Large groups don’t participate for the good of the commons. Create systems where people can participate for their own selfish reasons. Threadless: “Submit an idea for a chance of fame and $25,000.” Google algorithm is based on links that humans have created for their own reasons. Nobody created links so that Google could have a great search engine. Tagging photos on Flickr – you do it for your own reasons, but it creates value for Flickr e.g. helping it to differentiate between ‘Apple’ as computer; fruit or New York.
4. Aggregating the results: We’re often talking about taking votes or inputs to score things and generate lists of outputs. The problem is that it becomes a game. Example: Favrd.com – takes the Favouriting behaviour in Twitter and aggregates the most popular tweets. There’s no public function to rank a tweet on the site, it just harvests an existing behaviour. So if we do these 4 things and it generates some outputs like a leaderboard, people might want to game the results. Example: Flickr ‘most interesting leaderboard’ which is an algorithm to find the most interesting photos on Flickr. Created an incentive for ‘bad behaviour’ on the site so people could game the system to get their photo onto the list. Same as SEO spam. Flickr changed how it displayed interestingness – instead of it being a ranked list (which people want to beat) and made it a random display of photos which it thinks are interesting. Makes is less of a game and so less likely to be gamed by people. Other examples: Threadless: on voting for T-Shirts – votes aren’t displayed until voting finishes to avoid groupthink. With online polls – you submit your answer before you see the results from others.
Popularity does not have to rule. The most popular thing is not always the BEST thing – the most votes deosn’t always win. Example: amazon reviews – doesn’t always rank the most popular reviews first – sometimes will find a popular positive and negative review.
Implicit vs Explicit Feedback.
Explicit: voting and rating mechanisms. Asking for an immediate decision from the user e.g. voting, rating etc. Tip: Use the minimum number of options necessary: do you really need to vote on scale of 1-10 or even 1-5. Might just need thumbs up or thumbs down.
Implicit: Monitoring pageviews; searches; velocity (how much is something changing over time) Interestingness (algorithms to make sense of all the data.)
Design matters. How you design the interface affects the results you will get. Even in subtle ways like colour. Changed a design from black and red version to white and votes changed.
Experiment with the crowd: red slide, audience shouts angry, warning, stop etc. blue slide: calm, ocean, relax etc.
Experiments with adverts, changing border colour: blue border did best for ads conjouring invention, imagination (because blue colour was calming so good for being creative). Red: best for ads where you want recall and attention to detail (because red invokes fear and not wanting to make mistakes)
If you are a visual designer, you need to learn colour theory!
Putting it all together:
Brooklyn museum Click! Exhibition. Users submitted photos which were rated by the community. First the community rated themselves as how much of an expert they were and how serious they were about art, then for the photos themselves. So you could view the ‘best’ photos based on how the critics rated themselves e.g. professional or amateurs.
GetSatisfaction.com: Lots of good examples of wisdom of crowds: Users submitting and voting for ideas for companies and products. Also contains some implicit feedback about how many people are participating, and the ‘mood’ – what the collective sentiment of the community is.
Tom wrote this on 15.03.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
My notes from Charlene Li’s presentation at SXSW…
Starting off by going back 20 years to Tim Berners Lee in 1989 wrote about the web being a social creation rather than a technical toy.
It’s only been in the last few years that we have had very simple tools to make that vision a reality.
Think of a social site: Facebook, Twitter, Bebo; Habbo Hotel; Last.fm
Social networks will be much bigger than these individual platforms. We’ll look back and think it strange that we had to visit a site to be social online.
Social networks will be like air – all around us.
Shoppping: Ratings and reviews are ok, but I don’t know the people reviewing. In the future I’ll be able to see reviews from my friends only. Building chat and discussion with friends into e-commerce to help make buying choices.
TV is becoming social. Current TV integrates Twitter posts into broadcast, but in the future we’ll have more control to see only updates from our friends, or from groups of people that we are interested in.
The trend is that social activity happens in other contexts, not necessarily within a social networking site itself.
Things you need to make social networks like air:
1. Identity – who you are
2. Contacts – who you know and what are the context of those relationships i.e. a real friend vs. a loose contact that you met once
3. Activities – things that I’m doing that I might want to share e.g. twitter; FB news feed.
We are still at the beginning of this.
Two standards: Facebook Connect and the Open Stack
Open ID; XRDS-Simple; OAuth; PortableContacts; OpenSocial
It’s not a standards war, but a journey towards agreeing a set of standards [hmmm, I’m not so sure otherwise FB would use and develop the open stack]
Identity: Work persona and personal persona. Use different platforms for different personas.
Friends: Filters and tools to manage different types of friend. Big problem of having separate friend lists for different platforms. Have to set up relationships many times.
Google/portals provide social data – collecting huge amount of data – email, calendar, and now voice.
We have to trust Google/FB/Yahoo with our data. Businesses potentially have to trust Google with their data too.
What will get businesses to be open with their data? Money.
Most digital activity resides outside social networks.
Example of The Insider adding social features using social networks. FB gets revenue share and new audience. The Insider gets profile information and better targeting of ads.
Using analysis of social networks to target ads, identify influencers.
Being a Fan of a brand on Facebook is not an endorsement.
If advertisers have access to social graph it can advertise a product that I’ve bought to my closest friends, without explicitly saying who it was that bought it. [like an anonymised FB Beacon]
How a business should approach it:
1. Evaluate where social makes sense. Where social network data can make the user experience richer. Leverage existing social data e.g. FB Connect or the open stack. Get privacy and permission stuff straight. Who will you trust? Google? FB?
2. Get your back-end data in order. Remove need for multiple sign-ins and profiles. Single identity for people in your database.
3. Prepare to integrate social networks into the organisation. Organisations are networked with human relationships, not hierarchies. Social networks will disrupt traditional information flows.
Put the customer in the organisation chart. Customer at the top, CEO at the bottom!
Open networks will be the new norm.
Tom wrote this on 14.03.09 – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
I’ve sneaked into one of the panel sessions at the SXSW Film conference. Couldn’t resist a session about generating buzz. Once again, please forgive the typos and mistakes – I’ve just posted this straight up without editing.
Audience in this session have notepads and pens – no laptops. Odd :)
On the panel we have:
Jessica Edwards, VP, Murphy PR
Negin Farsad, Comedian/Filmmaker, Vaguely Qualified Productions
David Modigliani, Producer/Dir, Crawford
Tommy Pallotta, Producer
Curt Ellis, Producer, Wicked Delicate Films
Let’s see what they have to offer…
Quick show of hands: Most of the audience here are film-makers.
Traditional Film publicity model: You hire a publicity agent and they pitch your film to the traditional media.
Promoting ‘King Corn’: Raised $500K for publicity. Theatrical screenings were useful, but showing the film in ‘grass roots settings’ like college campuses, farmers markets was very effective and could get paid for the screening.
Most films lose more money in publicity than they make at the box office so the key is to make your publicity dollar work better.
Launching film on Hulu: Crawford was first film to launch on this platform. More views that opening weekends of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 911.
Create a ‘Host your own screening’ programme. These people become your PR machine – tapping into their friends and contacts.
It’s a myth that giving a film away online or at screenings damages DVD sales because of the value of the buzz that’s generated will ultimately sell more DVDs.
You never know who knows a mainstream journalist. Your grass roots publicity can cross over into the mainstream mass media.
Good publicity requires a strategy and understanding the publicity landscape.
Pallotta is going to try out releasing his new film on Bit Torrent with a note to tell people to write and talk about it if they like it, to see what kind of publicity that generates.
Holding a traditional screening will get you reviews in the mainstream press, but it doesn’t guarantee that people will actually go and see the film. But distributing for free online almost guarantees an audience which gives you a chance of a groundswell of buzz building.
Hulu will give you a share of ad revenue so you can make money from this distribution channel. It’s not much though – the biggest value is getting your film out to a large audience to build buzz.
Set up a Facebook, MySpace, Twitter ‘extravaganza’ (!). Good for word of mouth but not necessarily mainstream cross-over.
Hire street teams to hand out flyers in towns where screenings are happening.
Some amazing views towards P2P filesharing on the panel: “It doesn’t lose me any money and it gets my film publicised for free” – wow. But I wonder how this will change once high definition P2P sharing becomes commonplace.
Question from me: Are major studios innovating with grass roots publicity too, or is this just for independents and small studios?
Definitely. However they often to make it look like grass roots support rather than originating from the studio. Artificial word of mouth generating in forums with fake user accounts.
Makes me wonder what the opportunity is studios to innovate in this area in an authentic way.
Tom wrote this on – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
Here are my unedited notes from this panel session at SXSW.
On the panel as have:
Rob Gonda – Director of strategy;
Juan Morales – creative director, Sapient;
Ryan Stewart – Adobe platform evangelist.
3 times more mobile subscribers in the world than Internet users.
Japan: the phone is the core of all lifestyle activity. Only just getting this in the US with the iPhone. 93% mobile; 7% PC-based.
iPhone hasn’t taken off in Japan because it isn’t revolutionary to them.
80% of iPhone owners use the web every day.
Android hasn’t caught up with iPhone yet. T-Mobile is only 7% of mobile marketing in the US so Android penetration is still quite low, but 15% of TM users have G1. Since it’s an open platform, growth is set to explode.
Flash on the phone will change everything because you can use a single asset to publish to the web and multiple devices without having to redevelop. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have Flash video etc on the mobile.
Being able to efficiently view a ‘normal’ web page rather than special mobile version is key to iPhone success and must be emulated by other handsets.
500m iPhone app downloads. $1bn in sales. 93% iPhones have apps installed.
There are 20,000 apps in iPhone app store, but there should be 100’s of thousands if it wasn’t so controlled by Apple.
7-10m mobiles with Flash by the end of 2009.
Adobe bloke avoiding answering questions about when Flash will be on the iPhone. It’s above his pay grade apparently :)
Adobe reckon that Palm Pre will be an early leader in Flash on mobiles.
Microsoft claim that their app store will be as open as Google’s. The panel has its doubts about this.
Apple app store works neatly because it’s all Apple controlled. Microsoft and Google app stores will have to contend with lots of handsets but should get much wider penetration.
Apps are successful because the price e.g. 99 cents is a throwaway purchase, and the payment mechanism is very simple.
There’s a different culture around paying for apps on mobile. Unlike the web, we don’t expect everything to be free.
Monkey ball iPhone app is making $15,000 per day. Yowsers.
Augmented reality: Not a new concept. What’s new is doing it with real-time content from the web and on mobile. Cool demos of augmented reality on iPhone and Nokia N95.
Merging physical world with digital. Pointing your phone at food in a supermarket and you’ll be able to see recipes.
[it’s almost scary to think of the possibilities of this once we have video capability in contact lenses. Will try to ask a question to the panel about this]
Lots of these mobile developments aren’t new concepts e.g. augmented reality and location-aware (GPS) but these technologies are being given new applications and being made highly mobile with new handsets.
Logo recognition – take a picture and your phone will bring up info about the product or company.
‘Audio barcodes’ – using frequencies that can’t be heard by humans to send digital information. Like watching a film or listening to music. Your mobile will be able to record the sound and decode the extra information which could be URLs to information on the web. [cool! Never heard of this before]
Question from the audience about disruptive side effects of this technology:
It will be much easier for customers to compare products, customers and prices. Ultimate good for consumer so A Good Thing.
Question about the state of mobile advertising: Consumers say that they don’t mind seeing mobile ads.
Talking about new devices: LG watch phone with Bluetooth, video, MP3.
Asked my question about contact lense displays :)
Panel hadn’t heard about them so they don’t think it’s coming any time soon. I watched a documentary about this on the plane so I know that it’s in development. I wonder if we’ll be talking seriously about this next year.
Batteries: someone in the audience said that MIT have created some technology that can charge a mobile battery in 7 seconds.
Biometrics: we will start seeing retina, face and fingerprint recognition built into phones.
Skyhook: uses three ways to locate you: GPS; mobile phone mast triangulation and WIFI networks. So we can be location-aware even indoors.
Tom wrote this on – what do you think?
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
I’m liveblogging this panel session from SXSW in Austin, Texas. I’m posting this without editing. Apologies for typos or bits that make no sense :)
Social media projects have to be signed off by a senior exec. This is “The Man.” How do we get him (or her) on-side?
Q: How much does getting the go-ahead depend on an ROI model?
Measurability is essential, but not necessarily direct revenues immediately.
Examples and case studies help build the case, then constructing your own models and projections. Can spend 6 weeks to get this signed off to a board of directors.
A key metric is ‘reach.’ (not sure how this is defined though – ideas in the comments please!)
Marketing metrics: equivalency – e.g. digital advertising, CPMs.
IT – expense reduction, cost effectiveness compared to other technologies.
Peter kim: You can make an ROI model say anything you like because it’s based on a whole load of assumptions.
It’s good to understand an organisation’s existing measurement methods and try to map onto that.
Measurement frameworks that are bespoke for the organisation are the way forward (some good measurementcamp thinking there!)
Q: What non-financial measures are useful?
Recruiting new prospect contact details is a good measure (e.g. lead generation or newsletter sign-ups)
The bottom line is always profit. It may be six degress of separation but you have to demonstrate the link.
Q: What are the non-financial considerations for a social media project?
Don’t think what can social media do for us, but what value can it give to your customers.
What resources can we support the initiative with?
Look at your company culture. If you have a difficulty with losing control, you need to work on that first.
Q: What about legal?
See if you can get a ‘special pass’ – permission to try some experiments and test out the concerns.
Create common sense guidelines, e.g. “Don’t do anything stupid”
If you can show that competitors are active in the space, this can motivate execs and even legal to take a few more risks.
Involve the legal people in developing the project.
It’s a myth that entering social media means completely giving up control. Yes, this happens to a certain extent, but you can still control many aspects of your message and brand.
Q: What do you do when social media is going to create or require a culture change in the organisation?
It’s a matter of perspective. For example, you might not get the whole company blogging, but you can try to mobilise a few enthusiasts and then build on that.
Accept that you won’t be able to change the culture overnight, but you can take small steps which can lead to a snowball effect.
Show your successes and failures to the organisation. Don’t be afraid of failure. It shows colleagues that you haven’t been fired for screwing up, and shows the execs that you’re learning, responding and adjusting.
Social media will cause changes in organisational culture, but we’re still at the early stages of this.
Q: How do you deal with the different agendas of execs?
Create a bespoke case for execs and departments with different remits e.g. IT, HR, Marketing. Also slant your biz case to their individual motivations. Is someone looking for a promotion? Look at how your social media plans could help them. Even let them present your plan as if it was their own.
Q: Which departments are more or less supportive of social media?
Evangelists can come from all departments. There aren’t particular patterns to support or blockages from different people. It’s more about attitude i.e. control freaks.
Don’t assume that the younger folk will necessarily be more savvy to social media. There are some CEOs who are fired up and ready to go.
Q: Any specific examples of successes or failures?
Sharing women’s stories around surviving cardio vascular disease. Held a ‘casting’ on Facebook. Eventually received 25,000 submissions. This was a failure as they didn’t have the resource to review the videos. [wonder why they didn’t add ratings and reviews to crowdsource the review process?]
Finding the most curmudgeonly doubters and talk to them about the issues and concerns that matter most to them and then talk about social media in their context to build support.
A client in the financial industry building a community. Spent a long time getting buy-in from everyone, but eventually managed to make it happen.
Q: How do you give the first social media project the biggest chance of success so that you can sell in future projects?
Make sure it is measured so that you can benchmark.
Set expectations to all stakeholders.
Q: Top challenge to getting SM project approved?
Don’t over-engineer – keep first project simple.
Tie the project objectives back to biz objectives.
Q: Best way to achieve success?
Planning.
Sharing success and failure with the organisation.
Define up front how you will evaluate success.
Q: Using things like Facebook, Twitter at work: Productivity drain or worthwhile? [ooh one of my pet topics]
Execs fear SM will be a big distraction. No different to when the web first came into the office. And no different to when computers were first installed (“oh no, people will play solitaire all day”)
Tom wrote this on 13.03.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
