The Experience is the Brand

@TrueMobileData says 59% of mobile web use is social. I say, “prove it.”

One of the things you learn early on in any intro-level statistics course is that the mathematics behind data analysis is, by itself, fairly sanguine about how it is used. Formulae are not terribly picky about the ends to which they’re put to work, and so any professional statistician takes care to apply those formulae, and present results, with discretion and care.

Data are easy to manipulate, precisely because there’s usually more than one way to perform an analysis. And because, “no significant effect could be determined” rarely makes for interesting reading, there’s a great temptation to dig deeper, and see if another analytic approach can’t “tease out” the truth.

When I read a headline like, “Half of all time spent on mobile internet is spent on social networking sites,” one big question comes to mind: what was the sample?

GroundTruth’s release claims that the sample size is about 3 million mobile phone subscribers. Which sounds appreciably huge, until you realize that there are about 285 million mobile phones in the US (see CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Survey, PDF.) So their sample covers about 1% of US Mobile handsets.

That’s certainly still a reasonable sample size, if the sample is representative. And to determine whether or not it is, we need to know at least something about the networks on which these handsets operate.

Why? According to Ground Truth, “…Ground Truth™ captures usage directly from network data provided by mobile operators and other data partners.” That’s a rich and reliable source of data, to be sure: but it says nothing about the representativeness of the handset users on those networks, as compared to the US population at large.

Ground Truth isn’t being very forthcoming about these data sources. In response to a question of mine, they tweeted: “We have a large sample of mobile phone users from a diverse group of mobile operators. Confidentiality limits disclosure.”

Well. Confidentiality is fine and understandable, but if you can’t cite your sources, don’t publish your conclusions.

The press release regarding this “study” is fairly vague in terms of data, but perhaps offers one or two clues. They go out of their way to mention that “mobile-centric social networking sites such as MocoSpace and AirG are better at engaging consumer than are with PC heavyweights like Facebook and MySpace.”

MocoSpace is an “off deck” social networking website, which means that access is not restricted to or sponsored by any particular network operator. They have a mobile-ready site, which renders well on an iPhone (although they do not have an iPhone app.)

AirG is a somewhat different story. It’s a mobile-based chat service, more or less an instant messenger client for your phone. It is marketed under about two dozen different brand names, including Virgin Vibe, Boost Hookt, Amp’d Chat, TELUS Chat Central, Amp’d Lounge….

Hey, wait a minute! These all have something in common. Most of these seem to be affiliated with pre-paid or pay-as-you-go mobile phone providers. That might tell us something about the audiences using these social networking sites, as well as whether or not these users’ behavior is representative of the mobile internet audience as a whole.

It might also be important to know whether or not either of these two site operators are clients of Ground Truth.

Social networking usage on mobile is important, there is no doubt about that. But publishers and advertisers need the whole story if they are going to make an informed decision about where to commit resources. To say that pre-paid mobile subscribers spend 60% of their time on social networking sites is important, relevant, and useful. But it is not the same thing as saying that “Half of all time spent on the mobile internet is spent on social networking sites.”

For a company with “Truth” in their name, Ground Truth ought to be going out of their way to tell the whole story, if for no other reason that to ensure that their data are taken seriously.

Social: To get something you want, you have to give up something you have

It seems we may one day regret the coining of terms like “social media” or “social marketing”. In their use, the very essence of the social conversation is muddled, tainted with notions of media plans, placements, strategy, and ROI.

Traditional media marketers are struggling to adapt to a world where the global conversation is beginning to eclipse the tried-and-true push of interruptive marketing. It is still probably too soon to declare the advertising of the last 100 years dead and buried: TV, radio and print, in-store display advertising and other out-of-home media still consume the vast, vast majority of advertising dollars, and they still command the vast, vast majority of people’s attention.

Still, we all recognize that this is changing, and the drumbeat of “social marketing” is speeding its cadence in large part because the changes in behavior among the Connected Class has been as rapid as the growth of that group itself. But consider:

• 5 years ago Facebook was a student-only closed network with little to no advertising, and there was no such thing as Twitter.
• 10 years ago, AOL was still the predominant method through which most people accessed the Internet, and Google was an unruly 2 year old with a piddling share of the search market.
• 15 years ago, people still bothered to distinguish between the Internet, and the World Wide Web.
• 20 years ago there was no widely accessible World Wide Web.
• 60 years ago, the first multi-episode TV series supported by a single sponsor aired, and next year, the last P&G-produced soap opera will end.
• This year single-sponsor episodic TV became a novelty again.

It took an entire generation to kill a successful marketing channel, and it’s not even dead. Social media may be the darling of 2010, again, but it’s a long way from being the dominant form of media.

And that, perhaps, is the point. What we call social media, and what we are attempting to solidify as a practice in social marketing, is something so incredibly basic that it’s a shame that we had to come up with a new name for it.

Let’s call it: Being Human.

The majority of social network communication is exclusive of any brand, just as the majority of online communication is exclusive of any brand. We talk, chat, tweet and text, and most of the time it has nothing to do with any product or service or company or brand.

Not only are they a manufactured artifice, brands – in their attempt to embody the physical, mental and spiritual attributes to which we are supposed to aspire – are themselves an attempt at control. “Drink This!” “Eat That!” “Smoke These!” they cry, plead, command. “Be Like Him!” “Lust for Her!” “Try these Cookies!” they implore. Brands want to guide you, cajole you, drive you. The language of brand marketing reflects this well, in its aim to drive engagement, upsell, cross-sell and build loyalty. This the language of command and control, marshaling ones forces towards a common goal.

People tend to distinguish between that kind of language, and the more natural, human conversation typical of their interactions with friends, family, coworkers – even people they pass on the street. So when the conversation moves from the street to online, it retains much of its original character.

How out of place, then, is Marketing-Speak. It is “mission-statement-speak”, ill-suited for carrying on a conversation with a human. Marketing-Speak seeks an audience, eyeballs, clickthroughs and conversions. But it cannot communicate with people.

To participate in the social conversation – to at least have a hope of being a welcome participant – you will need to leave behind the dubious comfort of your marketing plan, your media plan, TRPs, and GRPs.

You will need to relinquish control over your message.

You will have to give up ownership of your brand.

The Power of (Almost) Free

Or, “if it’s truly worth something, offer to give it away.”

2D Boy, makers of World of Goo, recently published the results of a little experiment: they offered to sell anyone a copy of their game for whatever an individual user was willing to pay for it.

About all that can be said about the extraordinary nature of the response has been said here. Summary: 2 blog posts | 57,000 copies sold | average price: $2.03.

That’s $114,000 in incremental revenue, for a game that had already been on sale for a year. No additional development effort, just a couple of blog posts.

Of course, it helps to have a product that people want and love.

There is a lesson here for anyone who sells digital products: if it wasn’t immediately clear already, you are at the complete and total mercy of your audience. The point is not that 17% of people chose to pay as little as possible for World of Goo; it’s that 83% chose to pay more. Most chose to pay, in their own words, “about what they could afford.”

For physical products, this pricing model does not work: it does not matter what you can afford to pay for that BMW, it’s going to cost what it’s worth. Granted, there are intangibles factored into that price (prestige, reputation, bragging rights… things that, you know, comprise a brand), but by and large the constraint on pricing is a matter of physics.

Not so with digital merchandise, where the only contributors to value are intangible: that is, value is measured inconsistently across the range of possible uses and users, and those able to pay more are likely to do so only if their perception of value is consistent with their budget. That is:

price = (budget / value)

Note that this is different from the give-away-the-razors-and-we’ll-sell-the-blades model that EA Games offered with Sims 3, or that seems to be the business model du jour. (Hey, the value’s in the community, so we’ll just charge for that!) In that model, centralized control of the economic model is still sought out. When the content creator seeks to control both its distribution and consumption, they often find that the marketplace responds in “irrational” ways: piracy at best, indifference at worst.

Putting your product into the hands of the people who will love it, and giving up control, does two things. First, it enables at least the possibility of outsize rewards, if you truly deserve them. Second, it simply acknowledges reality: you don’t have control anyway.

What a relief this should be for people who are actually passionate about what they’re creating: the monetary and intangible rewards become much more intricately linked with the true value you create, rather than the “message” you’re able to sell.

10 Reasons Why the Crowd is Not Your Friend

TwitScoop, tag clouds, crowd-sourcing, flash mobs, prediction markets… at least a couple of these things sound like they should be useful tools. But as some have pointed out, aggregated knowledge often turns out to be nonsense where the future is concerned.

1. A short-term trend is really just noise.
2. Crowds follow leaders, but:
3. The mere fact of leadership does not validate, by itself, a direction.
4. Popularity can often trump reason.
5. After a certain inflection point, trends can generate their own steam, amplifying a false signal.
6. Mobs are not, generally, known for tendency to consider unintended consequences.
7. Stripping a problem of its complexity, so that judgment can be rendered by thousands of people simultaneously, often produces an irrelevant answer.
8. Early results in prediction markets – when they would be most useful – fail to predict alternative, as yet unforeseen outcomes.
9. In order to get useful input from a large sample of market participants, the problem set has to be readily understandable (see #7.)
10. Self-awareness of their impact on the outcomes they are predicting should, eventually, muddy the predictive waters enough to make them useless.

If I were a betting man, I’d say less than 1/2 of these eventually turn out to be provably true.

To be equitable, I’ll try to come up with a few examples of how crowd-based decision making might actually be useful.

You should not follow this advice

Dustin Curtis recently did a little experiment on his blog, testing different versions of an imperative for his audience, imploring them in various ways to follow his him on twitter.

His basic premise seems to boil down to: tell people what to do, and they’ll do it.

The commenters to that post pointed out a number of problematic issues, namely:

• The non-linearity at which twitter followers grow (nothing succeeds like success) could mean that as his popularity was increasing anyway over the test period, the clickthrough rate on Dan’s site was driven by an increase in inbound clicks sourced from twitter. (Note: This isn’t true; regardless of the rate at which traffic grew, it would proportionally affect each of the variants, since they were served randomly.)
• The particular subset of the global audience which read Dan’s site would be more likely to follow him in the first place (so these results might not be generalizable)
• The phrasing is merely novel (so the wider its usage, the less effective it will be)
• It was the length of the phrase, not the phrasing itself, that made the difference.

And the responses ranged from “this is interesting, I’ll try it,” to “you’ve missed a lot of points,” to “don’t worry about why it works, just do it.”

One complicating factor that I don’t think has been adequately explored is whether the length of the wording might be assisting its noticability and readability; A variant of this line of thinking would suggest that Fitt’s Law was at work (essentially, longer links would be easier to target and click), but in each variant, the actual linked text was the same length.

The more generalized conclusion seems to be that forceful, command-oriented links might be a better way of leading people through an interface. Intuitively, this might make sense. It seems to fit within the confines of well established usability heuristics.

So, should you follow this advice? Not really.

First, you’ll have to consider your audience. If you are a highly skilled UI designer who custom-crafts the layout and design of each blog post in Photoshop, it is possible that your audience will appreciate you telling them what to do (after all, your expertise drew them in in the first place.)

If you are a business, and you are trying to gain a new customer, the hard sell might not be the way to go. Context counts.

Twitter as platform

I’m admittedly late to the bandwagon. Now that I’m finally on twitter, I’m finding more and more uses for it everyday. Still, I have an aversion to publishing everything I’m doing, every minute of the day, and have so far mostly refrained from re-tweeting (“me too,” never adds anything to the conversation) or following others just because they’re following me (friendship isn’t something you accumulate, it’s something you nurture.)

Still, I’m impressed by the number of applications being developed on the Twitter Platform. By which I mean, applications which use Twitter as a mechanism for data transmission and manipulation, rather than an end unto itself:

• Collecting diary entries from participants in a usability study
  As fascinating as the study results are themselves, I’m more intrigued by the fact that twitter was used to facilitate the gathering of study data (albeit only an initial pass. End-of-day email surveys were used to augment the data.)
• Using twitter to self-monitor behavior
  Tweet any behavior (drive, eat, sleep, punch, meditate, etc.) and any quantity (25 miles, 6 lbs of spaghetti, 4 hours, 3 kittens, 20 minutes) and your.flowingdata.com will capture that information and chart it for you, and let you interact with that data so you can identify patterns (too many carbs + too little sleep = angry at cats) and change behaviors.

This is obviously the key to twitters future (if ever) profitability. The catch is that twitter succeeds as a platform because it’s free; any monetary component is going to have to do more than merely shift the burden of profitability to developers in order to succeed in the long run.

It’s not that I don’t care about what you have to say

So why don’t I have comments turned on? It’s a completely reasonable question, and in some ways by writing this I’m undermining my own answer, but here goes.

When I first started blogging, one of the most aggravating aspects was the commenting system. Not just because it invited the most down-market spam imaginable, but because each and every comment seemed to beg a reply. Or rather, I couldn’t help but reply to each and every one.

And so each post became a nearly endless conversation, confined within the meager bounds of my little blog.

Markets are conversation, I admit. And it isn’t that I’m trying to avoid the conversation, nor is that I’m solely interested in making a statement and not dealing with the aftermath. There’s a place for ongoing commentary, the back-and-forth reply and counter-reply of a good old fashioned debate: it’s called The Internet.

Self-publishing has become so simple – the barriers are so low, they don’t even exist – that I just don’t feel obligated to provide a forum for others to express their reaction to what I have to say. That sounds a lot more elitist than I mean it to be, so let me try again:

If what I have to offer inspires you to respond, you have the means to do so in far more engaging, open and interconnected venues than I can offer.

And if what you have to say invites a reponse you’d rather keep between the two of us, then there’s ways to do that too.

[Update: 7/28/08]: OK, I’ve relented. In a word: WordPress. The experience of migrating taught me a lot about the dangers of leaving commenting open (If you’re curious as to what 9 years of trackback spam looks like, comment here and I’ll post it), and the ways in which collaborative filtering has made it possible to effectively avoid the work involved in moderating comments.

Still, I imagine that if the volume grows to any considerable degree, I’ll have to reconsider the issue.

Doc Searls gets spammed

Doc’s getting spammed, as horrendously as the rest of us. But maybe he (and you) doesn’t know that there’s something he can do about it. And if this Wired story is right, there’s quite a bit of money to be made in getting spammed.

This, plus the discussion that’s going on on cluetrain….

This, plus the discussion that’s been going on on the Cluetrain list brings me to a point. I’m certain that it’s been made many times before, but I think it’s about time the issue was solved. Big media organizations, and even smaller ones, get listed as news sources at least in part because they carry some cachet of credibilty. Whether that credibility is earned in the first place, or maintained by upholding high journalistic standards over the course of their existence, in many cases it’s simply implied by the organization’s name. The Washington Post will get quoted again and again (as will Reuters, AP, UPI, etc.) because they’ve built up a reputation (and at times taken the effort to rebuild) for quality journalism.

Blogs are therefor at a significant disadvantage. A few (like Doc Searls’, let’s say) have earned their credibility over a long period of time. The plethora of blogs related to 9/11 pose an interesting dilemma. What fairly simple method is there of determining whether or not any one individual’s blog is credible? Some of the most relevant information, like personal accounts of the tradgedies, are going to be continuously viewed with skepticism as to their veracity. Personally, I hate to admit that brand awareness still deserves much attention these days, but with news you don’t really have much choice.

OK, OK, that’s not entirely true. Many blogs contain commenting features, so if an author is truly bullshitting his audience, and someone knows it, then it can become apparent. But given that Doc has posited “maybe it’s time to list them among news sources, no?” I think it’s important to ask, “how do we gauge their credibility?”

I think, by the way, that blogs and the commenting systems they use, as well as the interaction among many blogs at any one time poses a wonderful opportunity for providing some sort of “credibility index.” Maybe some sort of cross-blog slashdot-style community scoring system could help….