Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Big Data, not Magic Data readers offer

 

Been thinking a lot about the Big Data thing recently and a. how reminiscent it is of the CRM goldrush (follow the money, as the man said) and b. how dubious much of the thinking being trotted out - about people, organisations and measurement.

And oh, little things about how advertising and marketing actually work - a clue, it's not like this...

So here's a piece that Alex and I wrote for the upcoming issue of Admap - free download for a while!

Let me know what you think Download Big_Data_not_magic_data

Related articles

Using {Big] data to reveal stuff about how we are

Free gift: influence and how things really spread

This man thinks big data and privacy can co-exist, and here's his plan

Happy Birthday SMS and a few thoughts on what wins

Pic c/o HAZ.de

Today it's 20 years since (the company that became Vodaphone) sent the first SMS "text" message (c/o a young engineer Neil Papworth, above), "Merry Christma" [sic].

Lots of noise in the news (read this text interview) and on the wires today about this anniversary* and lots of good commentary around the unexpected success of this technology (although much of the US steadfastly refused to adopt it for a number of years...).And much sense spoken about it...e.g.

It's hard to imagine not having access to this technology and hard to underestimate its importance and not just to teenagers - I remember teaching my own late mother who spent a decade in a wheelchair to text and it connected her to the outside world in all kinds of ways (this is also the origin of my "#chocsawayalgy tweets, btw).

For me, several things stand out the success of this technology:

1. SMS was not the best technology then and isn't the best now - we tend to assume the best will win or (after the fact) equally that the winners must somehow be the best

2. Rather, if you wanted to be pseudo-Darwinian about it, you might suggest SMS was the fittest - that it was most suited to the context - cheap, short, flexible, etc - ideal for economically-challenged young folk who desperately want to interact with each other, all the time.

3. This would imply that the mobile telco's just misunderstood the reality of the consumer context and presumed that the high-spending customers (business folk) - that is, people more like how they saw themselves - would necessarily be the key adopters of new technology (a mistake we've all seen lots of times).

4. However, you could also see the relative lack of importance of a superior product as strongly  indicative of a socially-led adoption - these technologies are undoubtedly spread this way, aren't they? Indeed, the lack of marketing input to drive adoption (until the telco's had woken up to the scale of the adoption and that very late in the day) supports this point of view.

So if you're thinking about technology of any sort and how to spread it, ask yourself:

a. does it have to be the best to win?

b. is it the people like you that are really going to drive success?

c. how can you help them to help you spread it?

In other words have a good look at HERD and IHWSH again...

 

*BTW have a look at this 10th anniversary review...

Blinded by the technolight

As if by magic: Tom's cartoon explores the underlying technophilia which dogs marekting and policy-making too much. Brain porn or Digital Everything - it's all technophilia, I'm afraid

More on Networks from the irrepressible Mr Rheingold

This is a doosie. Not sure we'd agree with everything.

Put your feet up for 15 minutes and listen to the man. 

 

Measuring influence

pic c/o Protein.os

This morning - in a rage at the latest Klout bollox, I stumbled over this great briefing by the Protein guys on the thorny subject on measuring influence.

Smart, pithy and concluding with words of bleedin' obvious/wisdom (delete as appropriate) from yours truly (think about it in terms of the real world first).

Enjoy!

 

Together in Amsterdam

 
Today's the main holiday of the Netherlands - Queen's Day - a celebration of "saamhorigheid" (togetherness).

Appropriate then that I've been here hanging out with the lovely folk at The Next Web and sharing some HERD-love (if you get a chance next year, get yourself down there).

And launching the Dutch version of HERD ["De ultieme kudde"] with the delightful Sander of Maven publishing (btw fab forward by Rijn of Blauw Research - thanks, mate!)

As the man/machine say: I'll be back

What are social networks for?

 
Pic c/o chinesemedicinenews.com

Been a bit quiet recently - partly because real world (family) concerns seem to have taken over a bit.

But also partly because have been feeling a bit bored by many of the discussions I trip over online.

In particular, there's still a lot of silly stuff around social networks and social influence.

So let's try to get at least this thing really straight:

Social networks are not channels for advertisers or for the adverts/memes you, your clients or any of your so-called "influentials" create, social networks are for all of the people who participate in the network. 

Being a social creature means you spend your life in social networks; being part of a social network gives each individual a number of benefits - shared protection, shared resources and most importantly shared learning. Our ability to learn from each other (the appropriately-named Social Learning) is one of our all-too-mutual species' most characteristic capabilties and the engine by which stuff gets pulled through populations (from technologies to health habits)

(BTW it's almost never the stickiness of your brilliant creation that causes the spread and even less often "social teaching" that most influence-models suggest)

Social networks are not best understood as channels down which folk send things; social networks are webs from which members pull down learning (from each other).

Now how does that change what you're trying to do?

Why talk really is cheap

  

Pic c/o of the Fabulous Henry R

Yesterday, my old chum David C pointed a bunch of folk like me to this piece in Adage by Steve Knox, the guy who runs Tremor - the P&G WoM/sampling outfit. 

Now, first of all let me say the two central points of the piece seem unobjectionable:

1. the idea of disrupting shared assumptions in a marketplace by what you do and how you say has been around in various forms (not least Jean-Marie Dru's masterpiece Disruption) for nearly 2 decades now. If you haven't come across it til now, I'd suggest you check your feeds (and the calendar)

2. It's good to root our theory in contemporary science. Again, the idea behind schema - whatever you call them - is not exactly news - even to the determinedly ignorant of science.

But,.....[yes, I know, I'm always qualifying positive commentary]

....what is it that I feel uncomfortable about in the case that Knox makes?

Well, I think I've got two areas of concern:

First, it does seem a rather selective reading of cognitive science - a post-rationalisation, even, to justify what the company does post-hoc - a bit of scientific sticking plaster to shore up the intellectual credentials of a business that has shifted around between sampling, testing and advocacy objectives. Starting with the business practice rather than the science.

Specifically, and probably most importantly, is what I see as a lazy assumption that WoM - what people say to their peers - is what shapes their behaviour; when it's what we see others do and whether or not we choose to follow them.

As Grant and I and Faris have all made clear a number of times, most human speech is - as you'd expect from a social creature - phatic - that is more to do with the inter-relationships between speaker and listener than about any specific content. Most human speech and communication (in the traditional sense of words and thoughts) is content-lite and people-heavy. It's really cheap.

Even if you take a more enlightened view of influence and see influence as more a pull- than a push-phenomenon, it's far from clear how WoM is going to be a major force of behaviour. Sure, we can read excitement or despair into each other's talk and writing but this is not the same as our behaviour being shaped by the content of what other people say (except in extreme circumstances, like a Fire!).

Bit more science, Mr Knox, and a bit less assumption, maybe?

Very like a network

“Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that ’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and ’t is like a camel indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or, like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.”

Yesterday I had a repeat performance of familiar disagreement with someone who loves the Network Metaphor - someone who sees the big N as the most important lens through which to build understanding how things spread.

Now, what I don't want to do is rehearse the arguments at length again (go here or here or indeed read one leading network scientist's views on the misapplication of the central ideas of network theory to human behaviour) to get your head around the detail. Nor do you need reminding that it's a whole lot more interesting and complex than the influentials models suggest - human life is not largely constructed of hubs and spokes, our connections and relationships are more fluid and flexible and of course it's often not the stickiness or other characteristics of a thing (or meme or whatever) that determines how far that thing spreads: it's the people and how they choose to interact with each other.

Suffice to say our use of the Network idea is really a Metaphor: - a comparison highlighting certain similarities - human social structures and interactions often behave very much like what we call networks elsewhere. e.g. the physical sciences or in electronics

Unfortunately we often mistake the metaphor for identity; the map for the landscape. 

Wouldn't it be better to think about it as a simile (as Billy Shakes does in the quote above). No one imagines that Hamlet and Polonius are saying that the clouds are actually camels, weasels, whales or any other living thing, merely that for a moment, in certain ways, they resemble that kind of thing in certain ways.

"Like a network", indeed.

Memories of the future (2) living off the exhaust

 
One of the ideas that I've bumped into again and again this last year in different forms is that the exhaust data is where the juice lies.

For example for too long, traditional market researchers have indulged themselves in a methodological arms race which presumes that new data is almost always the answer, rather than find new ways to analyse the datasets they already have.

For users and vendors alike the truth is the same - rather than look at existing datasets afresh or rethink how we manipulate them to see what we can glean, most of us instinctively rush to collect new - fresh - stuff.  Which is a shame because - given the right kind of analytic curiousity - we can all learn a lot from examining the "free stuff" that's all around us, using the kind of  [See for example the paper John Kearon and I wrote this summer Download BrainJuicer Paper - Me-to-We Research]

Also, if you're going to be at MRS this March, I'm pulling together a bunch of smart social scientists to share their [Darwin-based] analytic tools for understanding mass behaviour. Download Jan 8pp prog_low res-1 And - if there's enough interest - we'll organise something separate around the time to explore the subject in detail.

Equally, I've been struck how people like David Bausola and The Kaiser are experimenting with putting the "hosepipe" of exhaust data that e.g. Social Media creates to good use in for creative and entertainment purposes. And - as will be revealed in due course - for other purposes, too...

Think about it in terms of sustainability: rather than rush to new data or fancy tools, what can you do with the exhaust? With the stuff that everyone else (including you & me) throws away?

Memories of the future (1) Cinema with the backchannel built-in

I've managed to largely stay offline for much of the last month - off the blog at least.

But in the last day or so, I've been pondering a few things that seem to point up likely directions

Not that these thoughts are in any way predictions (precise and definite singularities)

Rather - as Swedish neuroscientist David Ingvar might suggest - they seem to represent pre-echoes of how things might well turn out...

So here's my first one:

 
Earlier this year, I was invited to a private screening of "Oy Calcutta!" - a fascinating documentary by young film-maker Saul Abraham about his grandfather's return trip from North London to the Jewish enclave in Calcutta he had left half a century previously.

What struck me strongly was not so much the quality of the film-making (excellent btw so watch that name) but rather the experience of watching a movie with the back-channel on: on the one hand, the key characters were known to many in the room, indeed, most of them were actually sat in the audience; on the other, the audience plain refused to adopt the expected passivity - they talked all the way through the movie, questioning and debating what they saw on screen.

My point here is not really about the movies or entertainment in the broader sense either - I'll be honest, I've seen better movies this year and I'm sure you have, too - but I've not had a more powerful and distinctive experience as this of what living with the backchannel is like.

I've talked and written before about how the connectedness which dominates our age encourages the backchannel to expand and spread into every corner of our lives* and I'm sure many readers will have experienced the joy of presenting to an audience when the twitterfeed on the screen behind you reveals all too clearly what your audience is saying to itself as you speak, but all too often we understand this idea of the backchannel in the context of marketing.

The truth is it's going to leach into every aspect of our lives - with some really interesting consequences all round. And not just for film makers (or marketing bods)!

*I'm sure you've heard the same old case studies from social media experts, so I won't repeat them here

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.

The main point of the Internet

 

Hugh coined this bon mot today and I think he's on to something. Not that anyone set out to design a thing which would achieve this for us...and of course, it also does other stuff, good and bad. No, the internet and all the associated technologies have turned out to be so powerful because they unleash our social souls....our incredible desire and need to live our lives in the company of others, to be social creatures.

That's not just hanging out with others like us on social media platforms, or lurking fanboy/girl-like around our fave blogs or twitterers or even listening in that rather spooky way that we've all got used to doing but more fundamentally, being connected to each other enables us to be the social creature we were made to be: to navigate the big world of people and things through other people's reactions to it, to seek safety and protection and solace from other people. To be human, in other words.

Yes, it does sometimes lead to what the Daily Mail fears as  "orchestrated campaigns" against the status quo ( although as we all know the organising is rather more often of the self- type); yes, it can lead to highly volatile patterns of excitement and rapid turnover of popularity. And the sight of us behaving this way together isn't always very pretty. Or edifying. Or something our Enlightenment forefathers might be enamoured of.

But the important thing - and the really revolutionary stuff at play here - is that this kind of technology destroys many of the cultural, economic and politic brakes on our fundamentally social nature.

That is the point of the internet, as Hugh puts it so trenchantly.

Travel made social

 
I'm a big fan of Dopplr and have found it very useful in connecting with my highly dispersed chums as we travel the globe, but Myskystatus is new to me. It's actually from those v nice people at Lufthansa...

Imagine the brief: how to increase salience of Lufthansa to international travellers (including non-loyalists) by making something of actual use...

Basically it provides auto-updates of exactly where you are to your chosen social media platform while you are in the air...

YAY!

HT Christian AKA @Sun4Startups

Thank you for coming

Yesterday, we trekked to the British Museum to see their fab Montezuma exhibit. And today I get this.

It's not tricky.

It's not something you should have to think hard about.

It's plain courtesy. Good manners, as Sair says. And you can (as in this case) get a machine to do it for you.

So why can't most businesses be bothered?

Too concerned with themselves. And the money thing. Just not human enough...(more on that shortly)