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.

Why I Don’t Interview Anyone

Our agency’s growth has been rather on the slow and steady side – which means we’ve roughly doubled in size in 18 months. Still, that growth can be difficult to manage, especially when the crush of client work comes in increasingly large batches, and good help can be so very hard to find.

Within the UX and Strategy group which I head (we called it “Performance Strategy”, basically because “User Experience Architecture, Media Planning, Analytics and Research” doesn’t fit nicely on a card, or in a sentence), it can be particularly challenging to manage this growth. I tend to look for people who have experience in IA and Interaction Design, preferably with both a technical background and an ability to communicate effortlessly with designers, programmers, clients and publishers. Experience with analytics and media planning is a plus; oh, it’d also be nice if you’ve run a usability study or 2, and if you’ve got experience interpreting eye-tracking data, so much the better.

While we’re at it, if you fit some or all of this description, I’m hiring.

Aside from all of these “paper” qualifications, there’s that ever-elusive quality we screen for first: fit.

I’ve gotten a lot of things wrong in my brief business life, but it’s brought to me to at least one firm conviction. Any company who’s work product is essential the result of a creative process has but a single competitive advantage on which to trade, Its culture.

It’s nearly impossible to define, and yet essential. And if it’s missing, deficient or dissolving, there’s not an off-site pow-wow or team-building obstacle course or fine-tuned mission statement in the world that’s going to grow one.

So when I look for new people to add to my small team, and to the agency in general, I find that the most important skill is the one that can’t fit on a resume. I’ve found that a resume, some work examples and 15 minute phone screen can tell me 90% of what I need to know about a candidate (or can at least let me know if the answer is “no”.) The missing piece, though, can only be evaluated in the context of what we do every day, which is solve problems with the help of the rest of the team.

So I don’t interview. At least, not anymore. I used to, and I used to do it a lot, asking candidates to sit down with me for an hour, sit with a few other folks for a while and see what everyone could ferret out about this complete stranger in the course of 20-30 minutes.

It’s a fool’s errand.

I’ve decided to do something else instead, and I’m excited about it. Tomorrow is the first real test-run, so we’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s surprise, but here’s a few things that drove me down this path:

• If I’m thinking about interviewing, it’s because I need to add to the team; I don’t generally troll just for possible future candidates.
• If I need to add them, it’s because there is work waiting to begin.
• Once they’re on board, there’s no time to get to know them, understand their working style, and adjust our process to match.
• I’m a firm believer in the concept of, “if the answer isn’t ‘YES!’, it’s ‘no.’” If someone isn’t absolutely the right person, we’ll know in a few hours.
• I’d rather not have hired someone only to have to let them go a few hours later.

With that in mind, a little experiment is underway. My theory is that interviews suck, and conversations are much more fun, and more relevant.

Running Interference: Google Brings Enterprise Analytics to Joe’s Tire Shack

In Joel on Software, one of my favorite writers on the business of software describes Microsoft’s strategy for keeping competitors at bay: just change the API.

Microsoft would be developing an email platform, for example, that made extensive use of some low-level programming within Windows, as would a competitor. But because those APIs were poorly documented (not a mistake), the competitor would have a hard time figuring out why their email program kept crashing. Microsoft’s Outlook team, on the other hand, could just walk over and talk to the programmers down the hall, and figure out how to deal with the issue.

And by the time the competitor had figured out their own problems, Microsoft would have released a service pack that broke all of their carefully-constructed workaround.

This is not a new strategy. Sun Tzu wrote:

Defend what cannot be attacked; attack what cannot be defended.

So, too, does Google employ a strategy of running interference. Writing about their constantly improving free Analytics product, Bill Glassman observers:

They might be showing obsession because of where they want to be, but then again, they could be throwing up a smoke screen to keep the competition too busy to attack Google on advertising.

We’re big fans here of Google Analytics – it’s price-to-feature ratio can’t be beat, and for many organizations that are tentative about taking the dive into web analytics, the barrier to entry is embarrassingly small. Three minutes and some copy-pasting, and you’re gathering data.

For Google, the value in providing an enterprise-level solution for free is not to reach deeper into the Fortune 500. The value is where Google has always been aiming: the vast and deep middle.

While the top 100 advertisers on Google’s ad network (by dollar volume) are certainly using an array of commercial campaign and traffic analysis tools, they certainly don’t account for more than 25% of total ad volume. That leaves a couple of million advertisers who could make better use of their ad dollar if they had better metrics. And remember, these advertisers aren’t necessarily trying to decide which search engine to buy ad space on – they’re weighing AdWords against the yellow pages, billboards, radio spots and placements in diners.

There is a huge, pent-up demand for information about the effectiveness of advertising, and as fast as the ad world is changing at the high end, the long tail of small business is mired in advertising techniques that have been dutifully driving their businesses for the past 40 years… and are about to get upended. By arming these companies with “enterprise-class” tools for evaluating the success of their campaigns, Google is creating a huge, loyal contingent of long-term customers who will shift their advertising budgets online in direct proportion to the growing certainty of that medium’s success.

In Praise of Long Copy

It is fashionable, of late, to conclude that brief, punchy copy is best suited towards capturing the attention of people online, because as everyone knows, nobody reads anything online, ever.

This strikes me a conflation of a well observed and well documented browsing habit among most people, who tend to scan rather than read. And particularly in terms of lists of items (products, news headlines, categories, etc.), scanning is even more punctuated, limited to the first two words or so of each item.

Is it a contradiction, then, that some eyetracking studies have shown that the Ogilvy Layout still works? Or would it simply be a mistake to conclude that offline and offline behavior are so different that conclusions drawn from one medium simply couldn’t apply to another?

Now, in magazines, which are mostly read as a diversion, the first thing to get scanned are pictures.  We are visual creatures and pictures typically convey a lot of information (and emotion) fast, so a strong visual is almost always going to be the first thing the eye fixes on when the reader is engaging in general browsing for interest.  Please note, though, that this scanning order changes for task oriented individuals interacting with a website.  People scanning a web page redefine “worthwhile” by relevance to their task, and therefore focus on the headlines first.

- Jeff Sexton, Tests Indicate Ogilvy’s Old School Layout Still a Winner

Behavior changes with context, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the context of an online experience is different enough that the “old school” rules don’t apply – users don’t read, they scan, for instance. How is it that scanning – apparently superficially – conveys enough information that users can choose intelligently among the maelstrom of options available to them? Are they so focused on their task that all distractions are ruthlessly cast aside in single minded pursuit of their goal?

This post started as the result of an item in my Twitter feed, led through three other related, linked articles (all quoted here) and will probably terminate in a half-finished thought. All the while, I should have been assembling an analytics dashboard for a client. Using oneself as a proxy for examining the behaviors of others is never a good idea, but I doubt that my experience in the last 30 minutes is drastically outside the mainstream.

We humans have remarkable brains, capable of processing scads of data coming from multiple inputs. But we are hard-wired to attend to novelty, and generally not quite so good at efficiently filtering out distractions. Why do 30-50% of DVR owners not skip the ads? Is it because so much of the advertising out there is so good, we just can’t bear to miss it? Or is it because the change of scenery is, itself, interesting?

I’m inclined to think – though I can’t yet prove it – that the tendency towards brevity, pithiness and punchy copy has not been successful in the aggregate. There may be specific advertisers who’ve benefited, but if the whole of the marketing universe has simply been sub-divided into smaller pieces and split between more voices, the overall quantity of message hasn’t improved (and I’m of the belief that more voices in a conversation tend to degrade its overall quality.)

Can a truly persuasive, high-quality argument (in the sense of a position one wishes to communicate and convince others of) be encapsulated in a 10-word snippet? In 155 characters? Can a customer be won for a lifetime of loyalty with a one-liner? A statement so inexplicably powerful that resistance is futile? (Wouldn’t that be quite an effective weapon?)

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.

Shocker of the Week: Mobile Usability is Hard

Aside from the more interesting data collection techniques used in the study, Jakob Nielsen has dropped a stunning bomb on the world of mobile web development:

Creating a useful and usable mobile experience is hard.

Of course, that’s only true if you are designing for the mobile experience, as opposed to redesigning a web experience for mobile. They’re different things.

Despite the prevalence of smartphones and iPhones and other mobile web devices, the reality is that, at least in the U.S., 85% of people still use a basic handset with a numeric keypad, and a 90 pixel-wide screen.

90 pixels wide: that is roughly the size of a large postage stamp. Those of you who have worked in the offline world, consider this comparison: you’ve been asked to take a full-page ad in USA Today and redesign it as a 6-line classified ad in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Or condense a 2 and a half hour film into 30 seconds.

These are not impossible tasks, but they are difficult. You’ve got to make some hard choices.

At The Archer Group, we’ve been hard at work on a couple of iPhone apps recently. Even on a richly interative, touch-screen platform with a screen as large as that, application development is largely a process of deciding what to leave out. Simplicity – both in terms of the UI but also at a deeper level of how information and functionality are structured, is essential.

On a postage-stamped sized screen, where input is limited to a 12-button keypad and semi-usable, at best, predictive-typing, there’s only one rule: if in doubt, leave it out.

If you find yourself overseeing the development of a mobile app, or the mobile view into your company’s existing online offering, consider this:

• The most popular feature among mobile phone users is voice. 100% of handsets can make phone calls.
• Assume that your audience is on a slow data network; graphics still take significant time to transmit, text is faster
• The mobile web is the Mathalon, not the Miss America Paegent; it doesn’t matter if you’re pretty, you have to be right.
• Of everything you offer your customers online, pick ONE THING to do on mobile. Do it extremely well.
  • After that, you can think about expanding your feature set.
  • Once you think about expanding your feature set, STOP, and DON’T DO IT.
• Go back and look at the one feature you built: make it work better and faster before you try to make it do more.

See, mobile usability isn’t that hard after all.

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.