“So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends.” —
Nobody Goes to Facebook Anymore, it’s too Crowded - UnCrunched
Michael Arrington proves, once again, that he has no idea what the average or common user experience is when it comes to social media. At all.
The average user doesn’t have ‘thousands’ of friends tied to their account. According to Facebook, the average user has about 130. You cannot be a focus group of one, when you do not have a remotely standard experience.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with a good friend about someone we had both gone to school with, about a decade ago. They had just kind of dropped off the radar, and neither of us had heard anything. We didn’t think too much of it, but it became a sporadic topic of conversation, almost a game: why can’t we find any trace of this person online, anywhere?
Over the years I checked social networks, googled a few dozen things a few dozen times, scrolled through photos and status updates of people who I knew used to be close to them, and still never really heard anything.
Understand, this wasn’t a serious investigation. I just found it odd that someone had remained so offline, and when their name arose again in conversation, I’d spend ten or twenty minutes seeing if I could track them down, this time. It was weird to lose track of a person to completely, in this day and age.
We used to throw theories back and forth; was this person dead? Moved to a country with less infrastructure? Changed their name, entered witness protection, joined an Amish community?
I found out not that long ago that essentially, to drop off the grid, it takes removal from mainstream society - the person in question had spent a period of time homeless. I only found this out when they appeared on (obviously) facebook, in conversation with someone else.
The reason I’m bringing all of this up, is that this is the reality of ‘total privacy’. Our online and offline societies are becoming so intertwined that you would need to withdraw from one, to withdraw from the other. The assumption that not using social media, or not owning a computer or smartphone, would keep you offline, is absurd. No one would argue that by not owning a camera, you can avoid having your picture taken. No one would suggest that you could avoid being written about by not keeping a diary.
The options for someone with severe fears about privacy, in a networked, social media driven society, are not exactly pleasant: you can participate actively despite your fears, you can passively be made a participant by those around you, or you can exile yourself from participation in mainstream society.
In a world where you need to accept that you can’t be invisible, the next best thing is camouflage.
And that’s why identity online is interesting as social media behaviours develop in the mainstream. You likely won’t be able to avoid having your legal name be searchable in a way that is connected to you. But you can establish a persona that you are comfortable with others seeing, a selective layer of your life that you’ve made peace with sharing with others, with the world.
Despite current, justifiable, fears related to privacy, the price of being invisible is too high. Instead, you need to focus on how you’re seen, and by whom.
This is an old topic, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about recently, especially in reference to a recent quote from Drake in an interview with Billboard:
“I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become. […] Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things.”
This isn’t to say I agree with the argument at all, but I do find it interesting, suggesting that curation is both 1) inherently an attempt to express actual identify rather than affinity, and 2) that curation isn’t a creative skill. I feel like these positions are incompatible, when you dig into them.
Curation is becoming essential, especially for brands operating online - not just on Tumblr, but on Facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. Finding enough stuff to talk about, or the Blank Box Problem, as the brains behind Percolate have dubbed it, is a lot of hard work, albeit a completely different type of hard work than creating something yourself.
I personally consider curation a low-order creative skill, because it does require some talent to do well (an eye or POV that is distinctive and developed), as well as dedication. But it’s not (to lapse into copyright lingo) transformative - and there’s a reason gallery curators are not generally considered artists in their own right. But this leads us to a solid point - curation is at core a developed form of appreciation, not one of creation. Building a collection isn’t about expressing what your life is, but instead about expressing your taste.
And doing so online means that it can be an order of magnitude removed from what you live, or could possible achieve.
Creation is an utterly different thing. When you create, you express some aspect of yourself, whether it be talent or intellect or perception. And the biggest issue that curation faces, as what is now the leading participatory activity online by my estimate, is that comparison with creation, with the generation of original work.
Because people are adding commentary, because they’re hitting a publish button, it’s easy to, without thinking, lump these two actions into each other. We use the same function on tumblr or facebook or twitter to share a meme we found amusing, as we do to share a carefully composed photograph we’ve taken with a new DSLR.
What we can’t continue to do, is pretend these are similar activities. Sharing is a class of action, but there are significant differences between the subcategories - debate and wordless screaming are both technically elements of vocalization, but we don’t insist that one has to be interpreted by the lens of the other.
Creative sharing involves originality, development of the content, and distribution. Curative sharing involves discovery, distribution, and possibly commentary. These are not comparable activities, and yet online we seem to insist they are.
If we don’t begin to draw the line between remix and reblog, in other words, we’re going to continue in the flawed assumption that we can learn the same things about a person, a brand, or a collective by looking at what they create, and what they curate.
‘The Medium is the Message’ pull quote does not discount the importance or impact of content.
It merely posits that methods of delivering information or content are what creates game changing impact. The message delivered is still essential, but dies without a medium. The message is shaped, empowered, and made real in a different way with each medium used.
You can have the best medicine in the world, but if it doesn’t have a delivery system, you still die.
Thank you.
(This is merely my interpretation. Feel free to disagree, if you have justification for doing so.)
EDIT: mostly written in response to this piece by Om Malik
[video]
The core node of the internet changes, over time.
It used to be a specific machine, a specific email address, a specific website, a specific profile.
Lately, the core node online is a person. And the tools that tie other outposts, other data, to the idea of a core, identity-based node, are the ones that are winning.
Which is why I don’t feel like many deeply interesting things emerging online will last. Not because they are broken, or inaccurate, but because they’re using the wrong anchor point.
The story is the root element of human differentiation. The ability to create, share, embellish and pass on stories is the root of our myriad cultures. But I don’t believe the story will ever be the core node online, because every story has perspective, and that perspective is inherently glued to the core node - a story from the Guardian has a different perspective than one on the same subject from the New York Times. A story from me has different meaning than the same one from you.
When I see people trying to avoid the core node question, or tie it to something ephemeral and open to broad interpretation, I wonder how their ideas will grow and survive.
People interact using their identity as the core node that ties everything else together. This is true online or offline. And I don’t think this is a step on the path to something else, I think it’s an inherent element of how our species works.
The simplest rule I know of is to just admit when something doesn’t make sense.
And yet, this seems to be the hardest rule to get people to follow, because we’re trained from an early age, to give people what they want.
Humans are irrational creatures. We want things because we don’t have them, because others do, because we see success as related to those things, or status, or power.
In my personal experience, having a passionate community is one of those things that most people want, and many people don’t have a logical foundation for.
But you won’t get a brief from a client asking if you THINK they should start a Facebook page, or hire a community manager, or develop a social strategy. You will be asked to do one of these things. And you likely won’t be given much of an opportunity to ask why.
But I don’t care. Push back. Admit when a request, or even a demand, makes no sense.
Because the true meaning of integrated isn’t “we did EVERYTHING” but “we did what made sense, where it made sense, in a cohesive manner. There’s a massive difference between building a touchpoint everywhere you CAN, and building a touchpoint everywhere that makes sense.
You might not need a mobile app. Facebook might not make sense for you. People might not respond to an email newsletter about your service. There’s a good chance you can’t ‘gamify’ your brand site.
And that’s okay. Despite what requests, briefs, and recommendations you’ve seen try to suggest, you can’t have something that is both innovative, and comes with best practice examples of how it has worked before. You can’t be game changing by copying the other guys.
You don’t win by doing things that don’t make sense. You win by doing logical, rational things that aren’t covered by (the current, accepted definition of) common sense.
And you win by doing them extraordinarily.
It isn’t an attack on power users, the same way Final Cut Pro X wasn’t a slap in the face to power users.
This is evidence of a core truth: no one changes the game focusing only on what power users want.
I don’t mean this as an extension of the ‘faster horses’ problem. I mean, simply, that your baseline experience shouldn’t be focused on what gets the power user excited. You don’t want to alienate them, but, let’s be honest, the intense power users weren’t using Twitter.com, or the Twitter iPhone / Android app anyway. So mostly, people are complaining that they aren’t the core target anymore.
New Twitter (or #newnewtwitter, depending on who you ask) is about redefining the experience to better align with the value proposition Twitter has been claiming for several years; that the service is about Discovery, or Serendipity, or Breaking News. And if you want to be the internet’s early warning system for everything, then yes, private message functions are going to be de-emphasized. Especially when you’ve had a little voice in your head forever saying ‘I have half a dozen apps that do the same thing, and given our deep integration into iOS, competing with iMessage seems dumb’.
But most important is the Discover (or #discover) tab. This is the first thing Twitter has launched that feels NEW in a long time. Breaking the massive firehose of data into Stories (organized by both hashtag and topic), Activity (adding even more of a social layer to the platform), Categories (aiding user discovery, which has always been an issue on Twitter) and even trends (which you can continue to totally ignore unless you’re involved in a current trending topic) is turning this churning mass of data with potential value, into a discernible discovery engine.
The Discover tab is Twitter becoming a relevant capital N news source, rather than a way of discovering what people you know, or know of, find relevant. This doesn’t replace any of what Twitter is and was, but it extends it. Twitter as news magazine also offers an important differentiator in terms of ways to access the platform - possibly enough of one that Twitter can own the access point again, and use that as a starting point for new revenue generators.
I’m not going to say the new Twitter layout is anywhere near perfect. In fact, I expect a large number of tweaks will be made, and soon. But I do think it actually offers a direction for the future of Twitter. Which, despite buzz, despite early adopter cred, and despite my power-user status (27,650 tweets and counting), isn’t actually about how me, and those like me, use the service.
PayPal made a very big mistake.
Paypal realized this, and fixed it.
But there’s a lot to learn from what happened, and it’s not just about the error made, and not just about the response.
This will happen again, in a few months, as it always does. I will note it, talk about it, and use it to remind myself that things need to change. But in the end, until we start treating every client-facing position as a media-facing position, this stuff will keep happening.
People are media outlets, now. Outsourcing contact with your customers, or lax training of customer service reps, is equivalent to letting interns run your PR department without supervision.
One of the biggest dreams of the average brand is still going viral. This isn’t new, but it is getting more irritating.
We could blame Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, and the man responsible for the word Meme entering public consciousness - this is the genesis of the concept of the ‘viral idea’, a self propagating memetic life form that everyone seems to think is the key to making any brand relevant.
There’s a key issue with this, and I think it’s best clarified by getting people to actually look at the most prevalent type of meme online - the ‘image macro’ format first popularized by lolcats. The example I’m going to use, though, was created by an acquaintance of mine; it’s called Watch The Cradle.
And seriously, you should check it out.
This is the holy grail of memes, as far as I’m concerned. A quick rundown of why this works:
1) It’s instantly recognizable. The image macro format is prevalent enough that nearly anyone who would find it amusing has encountered it online already.
2) Getting it comes with a certain amount of cachet. To understand Watch the Cradle, you need to be familiar with internet jokes, and familiar enough with a popular hip hop record to know the lyrics being referenced.
3) It’s cute. There are babies, which make everything more pleasant, and changes the context pretty effectively.
4) It’s accessibly participatory. You don’t need to be particularly creative to participate, you just need to be familiar with the format, the music, and google image search.
5) You can share it with everyone around you, pointing out how clever you are, whether for finding / getting it, or for contributing.
In my mind, these five points are the big ones to hit to cross over into virality, with the big missing one being the intangible (that is to say, being so undeniably awesome that people NEED to share or participate).
The problem I mentioned earlier? The problem is that we can use these same points to explain why the fat kids get teased in grade school.
Everyone gets the joke. You getting to laugh means your aren’t one of the people who is the butt of the joke. It’s funny, even though you shouldn’t be laughing. Anyone can join in, and in fact, you gain respect and power by joining. It happens in public, not in isolation.
What I’m trying to say is, brands need to aim higher. None of the attributes I’ve mentioned build positive associations about the subject matter.
You don’t want to be viral. You want to be the thing that is so culturally relevant, it inspires this low impact participation. That doesn’t happen by trying to go viral.
Awesome though it is, you don’t want to be the image macro that made me laugh so hard I spit coffee on my keyboard. You want to be the amazing record by two titans of the form.
Your objective should be to inspire participatory culture, and to exist in a form that facilitates it. Brands that mean something don’t create movements. They inspire them.