Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Seth, Santa & the mob

Nice piece from Seth Godin today (HT peter_harrison [email protected]) about the importance of...I'll have what she's having and buying "the" christmas toy:

"...there's no [longer a] mad rush for the "it" gift, the safe, coveted gift that demonstrates the giver was able to finagle a favor or brave a crush of shoppers. The notion of the one, the it, the winner, the safe choice--this is about buying without taking responsibility.

Clearly, there are as many new and wonderful things this season as there are each year, all that's missing is an anointed toy of the year. The masses want to buy what the masses have chosen as the winner, because then the purchase isn't their fault.

And that's what happens every day in just about every market, business or consumer. A few people want to take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome. But most? They just don't want it to be their fault"

Just a couple of thoughts:

i. it's not the absence of mass TV that creates a fragmented and unpredictable marketplace - TV viewing is not as dead as folk like Seth are prone to suggest (though our relationship with it has changed) - but rather the increasing number of connections we have with each other (and the opportunities to see what other folk are having).

ii. it's always interesting to examine the choice of words that people use to describe the early adopters ("take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome...") and the rest of us ("the mass...isn't their fault").

It's not just Seth, we all do it. The lionising and fetishation of early adopters - like Apple's "the crazy ones" - is something we marketers could do with having less of next year, please. It's an unhelpful bit of extrapolation from poorly misunderstood social science. Early adopters vary by market and by occasion and by context; and most of what is chosen by the cool kids never gets anywhere - the legwarmer revival anyone?

Learning from each other is core to what makes our species successful - pretending it's not and that independent choice rules the world is just wrong. And shows how blinded we are by our cultural blinkers...

Happy Christmas, nonetheless, Seth. Hope you have what I'm having... 

 

 

 

The office is not just for work

 

Pic c/o some hard-working Aussies

Interesting (and as ever) thought-provoking post from Seth on the end of the office

Whilst topical (and hugely resonant for those of us who live on thin air), it's not exactly a new thought, is it? For as long as I can remember futurologists have been promising just this.

I think there are at least 2 things that explain why we keep "going somewhere"

i. the office is not just a place, it's a community full of other humans 

ii. the office is not just a place of work, it's a place to interact with aforementioned humans (which is what we Super Social Apes love to do). It's a social object, if you like...

ii. the office is always going to be a place to go if it seems that everyone else "goes somewhere" like it, too

And let's be honest, where else are you going to play this top game?

Influence, the influentials and the influenced

 
Nice musings by chum David C and Stowe Boyd around this study that suggests it's the not the number of connections you have that determines your influence, but rather the nature of those connections - your "betweenness" as Stowe calls it:

"It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses." [SB]

But David makes this important point:

"Influence is fluid. It resides less in the node and more in the interactions between the nodes. It is the interactions which change the state of the group, not a change in the condition of the nodes (think water H2O molecules and ice, water, steam...

...This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence others with"

Which prompts my sixpenceworth:

Influence is not something done by certain people to other people (as for example the pic above from New Scientist might suggest) it's the result of those people we call The Influenced doing something in response to those we call Influential.

As Duncan Watts and Matt Salganik noted in their important music-download paper, it's more about the readiness of a population to adopt a behaviour than the behaviour of specific individuals.

I.e. The Influenced do the heavy lifting of Influence, not the Influentials - and the fact that Influence is often mutual i.e. we all (well-connected or not) take cues from each other - that's one important reason why the search for the Influentials is so prone to misunderstanding and dead-ends.

As soon as we grasp this, going about understanding and harnessing influence begins to be a little more sensible...

Nigel Hollis and JFK

 

Picked up something from the twitterstream this morning that seems to have got a few chums excited.

Nigel Hollis - chief adresearch guru at Millward Brown - has been musing on the relative roles of Mass & Social Media and whether on

Here's the tricky bit of his post

"All of this leads me to believe that social media is no way for a mass market brand to disrupt the status quo. It is simply an additional means to communicate and engage your loyal customers"

Well, sort of.

On the one hand, it's true that i. few mass market brands have (YET!) entirely switched their marketing budgets to Social Media and ii. as Faris points out the whole SM game tends to deliver slower changes in outcome than most heroic marketers would like (it's no easy quick fix for sure).

On the other hand, I suspect what lies behind Nigel's comments is this:

He still sees Mass Media as tools to do something to/send messages to/persuade etc audience members and Social Media as just a smaller scale and geekier version of the same kind of thing.

The point being (again) that SM is not really "media" in the sense that he thinks Mass Media are (nor indeed is mass media really as Neil et al have been pointing out): it's a different kind of thing.

And that different kind of thing seeks to create (or rather, stimulate or catylise) change in an entirely different way, by open up and humanising the business.

To paraphrase JFK, it's not what Social Media can do for you but what it can do to you and your business.

The Real Value of Content

 

Gareth's done a nice post in response to this piece on where the money is going in the Music Industry from the Times Lab in an age of downloading.

The real decline is in money earned by the labels on recorded music. As G says "if your business model is purely one of content distribution it's perhaps time to exit.

Of course, I heartily endorse his comments about the fundamentally social nature of music (and linklove) " this is perhaps evidence of the fact that we tend to enjoy doing stuff together.  Perhaps music is the ultimate social good, rather than the private good record labels would like it to be"

But maybe what we're also seeing is some kind of re-adjustment of business models. Did a great interview with the awesome Lance Weiler recently where he suggested that Hollywood and the music biz need to go back to a time when only a small part of the value lay in the story being told and rather more in the telling and retelling; less in the song being sung and rather more in the singing and its resinging; it's less the content created, packaged and protected by IP and more in what the audience does with it. 

Great content is fine but it's only the start...it's a social object, folks

Irony alert: nice to see that this comes from the lovely people who've been a. telling us that quality content deserves proper payment b. scraping blogs for free content to pass off as their own.

Greatest Hits

 
Love this idea of Kevin Duncan's.

A blog about a book he's written which reviews the best Marketing and Business books (1-page each).

In other words, a blog that gives you the content of the book that you might or might not choose to pay for which itself gives you the content of the books it describes which you might or might not go on to read or re-read (phew!)

Brilliant!

Reminds me of that great Myles na gCopaleen gag about a (fictional) service that preloves your library's contents for you so you don't have. Think it's in this collection of his satirical columns for the Irish Times.

Thirsty?

Pic C/o Timesonline

Just a bit of a headsup: am joining an interesting bunch of people over here at the Spectator's new Culture blog, Cappuccino Culture

Think it could be a lot of fun. Never contributed to a group blog before. Wonder how much we're going to respond to each other....

First post from me is up there now - on cricket and our social selves. Natch....

Go on. Stick it on your feeds...