Jan 29, 2013 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Groups, networks, friends, and even loose 2nd and 3rd party connections via social media all have similar characteristics when viewed from a distance. Groups of people interconnected in some way.
However, the real value of a group is its density, how close they are, and how mutual are all the links, how much they share, and of crucial importance, how much they contribute rather than just being conduits.
A small group is able to self regulate easily, there is little tolerance of free-riders, there is a high degree of “density” among the members. However, a large group is poor at identifying and excluding free-riders. The number and strength of connections between individuals in the larger group are much less, and weaker, there are those in the group who have no connection with each other beyond membership of the group: the density of the group is much lower.
A high density enables stuff to get done, the group can co-ordinate the actions of its members. But there is a paradox here, a large group can also co-ordinate, and in a short time, but only in the negative, it can be somewhere to stop something, to protest, a very simple, single purpose, but it cannot map a course of action and follow it. A dense group can map a course, follow it, and if dense enough, accommodate changes in direction.
Consider how easy it is for a group of three friends to agree to go to the pictures next week.
They agree a time and film to see that suits them all.
Now consider the added complications of adding an extra three friends to the party, all that extra schedule matching, as well as the varying tastes in film. How much more difficult this would all be if the added three are just acquaintances of one of the original three, unknown to the others.
Density, not numbers is the key to social success, in media, as well as in life.
Jan 17, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The value of Facebook has tanked since the IPO last year, largely because after the hype, people wondered how the returns would be delivered when the obvious source, advertising, does not really work on Facebook.
However, Facebook is in the throes of launching an extensively re-engineered search facility, “Graph Search“. This facility will enable placement of extremely focused advertising in situations where the search being conducted is for things other than friendly e-conversation. This change potentially removes the barrier to successful adverting on Facebook, the disinterest in anything commercial when interacting with friends.
This Wired article on Graph Search offers detail, but essentially, the new search facility reflects peoples networks as a graph, or network chart, and the search capability can interrogate the network, and answer questions, with extensive auto-complete suggestions based on your previous activity.
Google cannot get at the data held by Facebook, that is a huge resource of people, networks, preferences, links, and reviews that can now be leveraged in searches conducted from within the Facebook community.
Similarly, the power of Linkedin is the connections between people and their work. Want to see who is connected to someone at a competitor, supplier, potential customer, and so on? now Facebook will be able to do it, perhaps better than Linkedin, particularly for the under 35’s.
An underutilised aspect of Twitter is the search capability, when used well, it is an enormously valuable addition to a Google search, and contains links that enable a deeper dive from any starting point in a topic. Other services like Pinterest also now chase the available advertising dollars, making media choices a complex nightmare.
Graph Search makes the battle for on line advertising even more interesting, and will add some extra lead into the saddlebags of newspapers as they try to monetarise their offerings. News Corp is in the middle of splitting their operations, separating newspaper film and television assets globally, restructuring to enhance revenue generation options, already having paywalls in place for their newspapers. Fairfax is expected to introduce some level of paywall sometime in the next few months in an effort to stem the bleeding.
As the search capabilities improve, and paywalls emerge, the attraction of free sources of information will increase, with the minor irritation of the presence of advertising. Facebook now appears to not only to be in a position to cash in on their huge network, but to potentially extensively disrupt the current web and remaining legacy media advertising options.
Jan 14, 2013 | Collaboration, Social Media
Perhaps the most profound effect of the now almost ubiquitous availability of connectivity is the move from a communication landscape that is controlled by the few who have the capital to buy the gear and produce stuff with it, to everybody with a mobile phone being a producer.
The old world, where there were two options, one to many, as in the case of a publisher of any media, or one to one, as in the case the telephone and letter, is dead. Now we have many to many, and the old way has been swamped.
It happened in the London bombings in July 2005. The news of the bombings was broken by commuters with phones, and for a while those caught inside the security cordons set up were the only source of information. The news of the earthquake in China in 2008 exploded onto the net before the US Geological service posted news that an earthquake had happened onto its information site. It now happens every day, the NSW bushfires were first reported by passersby, and the alert mechanisms for places in danger now rely on social media.
On a similar, but far more personal vein, I heard of the death of Arran Swartz over the weekend via various blog sites I follow, but did not see the first news story until about 5 minutes ago. Vale a true activist innovator, gone way too young.
Marketers who wish to remain relevant need to adjust their thinking to accommodate and leverage this revolution in the velocity of information. Indeed, the only organisations unaffected are those that contain only one person. Hermits are pretty rare these days, and they probably have a phone anyway.
Jan 9, 2013 | Collaboration, Operations, Small business
We all negotiate every day, from the small mundane things in our lives to once in a decade decisions.
Two simple considerations play a key role in the outcome:
1. Controlling the environment in which the negotiation takes place, and
2. Constructing the conversation such that the other party nominates their expected outcome first.
A successful negotiation is one that has all parties leave the table happy and prepared to execute on the agreement, but consider the impact at something like location can have on the behavior.
Imagine you are negotiating a major deal, and the other party nominates a 5 star location as the venue, compared to going to their plant and conducting the negotiation in the factory lunch-room. It is likely that the differing locations will impact on your expectations?.
Anchoring is the psychological process underlying the point from which a negotiation starts, and generally dictates the region in which it finishes.
Research by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist with a Nobel laureate in economics, displays this anchoring behaviour in experiments using a roulette wheel. He asked subjects to guess the percentage of African nations in the UN after spinning the wheel. Was the number greater or less than the number on the wheel?. Subjects who saw a low number on the wheel consistently guessed the percentage of African membership lower than those who saw a high number.
Clearly the roulette wheel has no impact on the number of African UN members, but the number at which the wheel stopped played a significant role in anchoring responses to the question.
Dec 20, 2012 | Marketing, Personal Rant, Small business
Yesterday in the midst of a sizeable gathering, one person was moaning about the rip-off represented by Christmas hampers, specifically one she had received the previous day. “Full of stuff I could have bought and probably cost half as much, what a wank”
Unfortunately for the moaner, the business that had given her said hamper was a client of mine, so I was aware of the thought, time, degree of personalisation, and genuine care that went into the construction of the hampers as a means of acknowledging the value they placed in the relationship. They did not have to give hampers, they wanted to. Whilst the costs incurred were important, the real importance to my client was elsewhere, a point entirely missed by the moaner.
It seems my client wasted the money they spent on that particular hamper, misjudging the total lack of grace of the receiver, but hopefully she was one of a very few who failed to recognise the intent.
I can say for sure that the mistake will not be made again with that particular person.
Merry Christmas to all my readers, I cannot send you all a hamper, but I can send you my genuine thanks for coming, commenting, and generally participating in making the writing of this blog a joy rather than a labour.
Merry Christmas.
Allen
