Minimum Effective Dose
The only thing that stuck with me, from the 3/4 of The Four Hour Body that I read (other than the knowledge that beans and lentils are actually kinda awesome) was the concept of the minimum effective dose.
Rather than looking at this as a medical or physical term, I’ve been thinking about it in all aspects of my life. As in: what’s the minimum effective dose for communication between friends to continue feeling connected and close? What’s the minimum effective dose for mainstream media for me to maintain an understanding of popular culture necessary to do my job well? What’s the minimum effective dose of research to ensure that I understand this project or target?
Or: what’s the minimum effective dose of marketing to drive our target to this action?
I find that people in this industry don’t often think about how little they can do, or how little they should do, to get things done. But sometimes a small, insidious impact is more meaningful than a massive, off-putting one. As much as I’m not a huge fan of subtlety as a concept, there’s something to be said for minimalism.
After all, no one attempts to demolish a building by creating a bomb big enough to have it explode - something of massive scale is moved instead by carefully placed charges, in just the right area.
And yet, the average large campaign is based entirely on the opposite principle: doing something engaging and/or clever, and then making it as omnipresent as reality or budget allows.
The benefit of minimum effective dose thinking isn’t just that it inherently saves budget, but that getting it to work requires more integration, not just between elements, but into the existing behaviour patterns of your target. And when you’re trying to have an impact without flooding the system, you generally need more small pieces, not one large attention-grabbing broadcast explosion.
Exclusionary Definition and Actual Personality.
My suggestion is a solution that eschews an algorithmic approach - my stance is generally that algorithmic approaches don’t do a good enough job when it comes to emulating or replicating something that’s based on complex human behaviour.
(n.b. - when I say complex, I don’t mean complicated.)
While I understand and support the need for brands and agencies to retain control over what is being said, and how, in online spaces, I think a prescriptive approach is deadening, from a verisimilitude standpoint - when you say ‘you must be X,Y,Z’, or even more specifically, ‘you must SAY X,Y,Z’, the chances of the outcome feeling real are slim to none. A way around this is exclusionary definition.
Basically, tell me what we aren’t. Tell me what we don’t say. I’m advocating a practice of essentially outlining a brand’s online taboo system, and thereby creating the bare-bones cultural dynamics that will influence online actions.
Some of these are dead simple: we don’t swear in public, we don’t do anything lewd, we don’t discriminate based on age or influence or looks.
Some of these are more complex: we don’t speak about specific numbers, we don’t identify individual staff by name, we don’t attempt to moderate behaviour by using embarrassment.
While exclusionary definition still includes limitation, it crucially does not define who a community manager or social media representative must be - it merely states what they must not do.
The upshot of this is that if you can explain it, you can ensure it won’t be part of the planning for your community. The downside is that you can’t know that something you didn’t consider will not come up - that’s too bad. This is the price of human interaction.
Developing an actual personality is different. I’m not talking about necessarily using a specific, public-facing individual as the focal point for your brand online. I’m talking about figuring out what you brand would be like as a person, and then outlining that personality for those who are going to be representing it, and interacting with it, online.
This isn’t the same as pulling out a brand pyramid, and saying that your brand essence is your actual personality.
When I think of this, I think of it in the context of a creative exercise that I once read about, in relation to the author Greg Rucka. The gist of it was, he creates entire backstories and explanations of every character he writes. Not just history, but political leanings, favourite authors, music, comedians, opinion on kids, what TV they would and wouldn’t watch, and more crucially, why.
As an example, Apple’s brand is, in my mind, about focus, quality, simplicity, and innovation. Apple’s personality, however, is about the kind of person who cares about those things, who also often cares about creativity, design, and the optics of what they buy and do. If you’ll notice, Apple interacts with these people directly and socially, they just do it in retail locations, rather than online.
The key thing about a personality is, it is expressed as subtext, through action. Brand messages are tailored to the situations they are expressed in, yes, but they still rely on telling you about what they mean.
A personality is about what you do, what you like, and how you react to things. This is what you need to know as you ask someone to develop a social content strategy for you, because this is what people will actually react to.
Is your brand the kind of person that would post Nyan Cat on their Facebook page, or the kind of person who would share serious links about the clean-up efforts happening in London? What if it’s both?
By nailing down both your taboo system, and your personality, you give those creating and executing your social media strategy the chance to make it actually live, and relate to things outside of your brand’s keywords and upcoming promotions.
And as an added bonus, this offers brands enough control, input and influence, that they don’t need to be hands off, to create a social voice and policy that is both human, and capable of creating meaningful positive associations.
Social Media Marketing and Pick Up Artists.
I realized this morning that about 50% of the brands I follow online are essentially characters from The Game.
To explain better, sketchy social marketing follows the same process that pick up artists do:
- find a complex process that some people are naturally good at (in this case, both variations on the human function of socialization).
- research successful variations of this process ‘in the wild’ in an attempt to find common patterns and steps that can be tested.
- take your learnings, and build a few algorithmic approaches, to be tested in real life situations.
- once you nail down the most statistically successful of these approaches, refine it, apply it constantly, iterate to improve, and continue to plug new variables into your equation with each new situation you meet.
My problem with this approach is that algorithms cannot adequately model realistic human behaviour. We’re still in the uncanny valley for making proper social behaviours, online or otherwise, a regimented process.
In other words, only people make good people.
The reason I compare this to the world of pick up artists is simple: just because it works doesn’t make it less sketchy. In the same way someone teaching romantically hopeless men a method for picking up women will argue they are ‘leveling the playing field’, agencies and social media practitioners will say that having a tightly designated, non-human-style method of formulating and sharing messages is about ‘finding efficiencies’ and/or ‘representing brands properly’.
My issue with this is that it never ‘levels the playing field’. Much like having a bunch of sketchy guys at a party desperately trying their new techniques to find someone to take home, their increased rate of success ruins the environment. Introducing sketchiness into an ecosystem damages the ability of that ecosystem to respond positively to authentic human behaviour.
Or, once bitten, twice shy.
The solution, of course, is to do the opposite of create an algorithm. Practice exclusionary definition, and develop an actual personality.
This is where I tell you this post is part one of two.
Feedback.
Most marketing sucks at feedback.
I spent a nice chunk of time in an arcade this weekend, for the first time in a few years. And it got me thinking about something every person working in game development probably thinks about a hundred times a day; how reliant we are on feedback - constant, clear and enjoyable feedback - to maintain interest in a task.
(No, this isn’t really going to be about gamification. I am tired of having conversations about gamification.)
My current twitter app of choice is TweetBot. And I realized today that part of the pleasure of it, possibly the largest part, is that it’s the feedbackiest app on my iPhone, with every button press rewarded with sound effects that feel like the airlock opening in an sf film, animations that are ever-so-slightly slower than what you normally see in a utility app (I think this adds to the feeling that it’s reacting to you, rather than doing things), and re-reactions (this is common on the iphone, but seeing a dragged panel bounce back, then bounce slightly off the wall upon returning to position is awesome).
I had been classifying these features as polish, in conversation. But they’re really just feedback - I’m consistently aware that the app has received my commands, so I rarely hit the same button again to make sure.
I spent a 2 hour bus ride thinking about the many different ways brands communicate with people, and how many of them are actually feedback-enabled. Unsurprisingly, the answer is very very few.
Imagine if every street-level ad reacted to you making eye-contact with it. The thing is, offering feedback requires the creation of something to be interacted with. And this is the real challenge, re-invisioning an industry that is heavily invested in the idea of broadcast.
For the last couple years, by number one question when thinking about campaigns has been ‘what does the user/consumer get out of this?’ I’m realizing I also need to be asking myself ‘what feedback does this experience offer?’
Because I’m stunned at how satisfying really feedbacky feedback is, even if I’m failing miserably at shooting Terminator robots in an arcade.
The only important question:
How does this fit into someone’s life?
Whether you’re creating a product, or a service, or a marketing message to encourage people to acquire a product or service, your only question is: how does this fit into someone’s life.
For the product, this is use case / product market fit / the core of the concept. And too often, the answer is ‘because it’s awesome’ or ‘because it’s sexy’ or ‘because it says something about your identity’. These are answers, but not good ones.
For marketing, I don’t see a future in telling people how the product will fit into their lives. It’s important to do so, but that’s not what is going to, at core, drive people to make a decision that they wouldn’t have already made. Good marketing is going to need to have it’s own answer to the question, and provide value (entertainment, informational, personal, or social) independent of the product itself.
Awareness is a side effect of generating real value. If marketing is aimed at aiding awareness and translating it into intent, marketing will need to create it’s own value, not just hype and weak association.
The worst answer to ‘how does this fit into someone’s life?’ is using marketing to try to create a use case. And for most of recent history, this is what marketing has done. Whether it’s associating a car with masculinity, or a Mac with creativity, these are weak ties at best. Your message should extend directly from what you do, and how you do it.
Your marketing should extend your philosophies into action, moving with the same purpose as the product, but with a focus on spreading those core principles, rather than giving them shape as a product or service.
The key point I’m trying to make is this: the idea that marketing is about manipulation is obsolete. Marketing is about extending and operationalizing your brand, where brand is defined as the identity created by the synthesis of your process, culture, product and ideals.
[This post owes a massive debt of inspiration to Umair Haque’s The New Capitalist Manifestio, which I finished reading this morning. Possibly the most inspirational business book I’ve read since The Rebel Sell.]
Calling Bullshit on ‘Gamification’ as a Buzzword.
I resolve to stop being impressed by comments about gamification unless we all agree that games need more than points and a leader board and awards.
Points are great for tracking progress, but the number in the corner of my book goes up the closer I get to the end. A book isn’t a game, regardless of that rising number.
A leader board is a great way to tell who’s winning, but the NYT best seller list is a very well respected and highly monitored leader board - and a book STILL isn’t a game.
You get awards for doing things. You get rewards for doing hard things, or thankless things, or valuable things. I used ‘award’ because most gamification consists of stuff like badges (like foursquare), that acknowledge action, but not necessarily accomplishment.
People play games for the challenge, for the narrative, for the thrill of accomplishment, for entertainment, avoidance, escapism, and action.
Gluing points to a social network isn’t a game layer - competition is not inherently gaming.
I’d argue that gamification requires the introduction of (at least some) the following elements into something that doesn’t, by its nature, need to posess them: narrative*, skill development, challenges, a managed and intentional learning curve, fun, and a sense of interaction.
The last one requires some explanation: I don’t mean social interaction - games can be played alone. I don’t mean interactivity, a game need not react to you. But games need to ‘force’ you to react to what happens in them, whether by narrative, by emotional appeal, or by pure irritation. The elements that people call gamification, including awards, rankings, and points, are ways to encourage interaction, to keep you playing; they are the carrot and stick of a game, they are not the essence of a game itself.
*By narrative, I don’t mean a conscious story. But, for example, in a game of tic tac toe, there is two players, conflict, a goal, rising action, victory, and denouement. Same deal with solitaire, to a point. Special status for repeatedly using an application isn’t a narrative, it’s a trackable history. Narratives attach emotion to action. Games, in my estimation, always have the possibility of narrative.
Using the social to “build buzz” and “push product” is about as smart as using a warp drive to visit your local Wal-Mart.
The myth of “lines”.
As everyone interprets things differently, the myth of a brand pushing the limits, or toeing the line, is problematic.
Everyone interacting with your brand has different limitations and acceptance levels. Therefore, toeing the line usually means crossing it for a significant percentage of your customer base.
When Eric Schmidt recently said that “Google is willing to go right up to the line of being creepy”, what he meant, intentionally or not, was “Google is willing to creep the hell out of a set percentage of our users”.
There’s no clear definition of what that percentage is. 10%? 20? 50? The ‘line’ is unclear, but it could be anything less than 50+%, logically.
Toeing the line means alienating a minority of users. And we live in the ultimate age of the vocal minority. Any group, when angry enough, can fake movement status.
You don’t push boundaries. You cross them by degrees. If your strategy doesn’t address the consequences of crossing a boundary (this could be as simple as WANTING controversy) then you haven’t actually thought it through. You’re still thinking of your market and audience as one collective entity, rather than a social entity held together by weak ties.
Digital Strategy is Transportation Planning.
[This post was inspired mostly by a KMDI event that I rambled at - while attempting to explain digital strategy via magic the gathering, I realized that example wasn’t meaningfully accessible (my social circle has a very high geek quotient). This is my attempt to explain it in a more direct manner.]
I essentially have the same job as my father. He’s a transportation planner, and I work in digital strategy.
Let me go back a step.
My father doesn’t know how to build a car. Or a bus. Or a subway. He knows the basics of driving and using one, but he’s definitely not a transit operator. He couldn’t design a car or a bus, but he knows when one has the right features for usability. He doesn’t design highways, but he can tell you how the population patterns around one will result in gridlock, or increased transit usage.
He doesn’t design any of the pieces. He knows what they all do, knows how to interpret the data regarding their use, and knows how to make the suggestions and recommendations that result in a functional system. If all the pieces play nicely together, cars and buses and light rail and trains and subways, the transportation planner(s) have done their job(s).
I’ve tried to explain what I do in a lot of ways, but this is probably the clearest one.
My focus is the consumer (commuter). They have a bunch of different touch points (transport options) that all build to the same goal, getting them information they want and/or need (getting them from place to place).
I might consult on the layout of each individual digital touch point (transport option), but I’m not the guy who builds them. I don’t know how to code a website (build a car) well enough to do it meaningfully.
I’m responsible for knowing what all the pieces are supposed to do, knowing how people use them, and figuring out how to link them together in a way that helps people do what they want to do, and migrate between touch points.
Abandoning the metaphor, this includes social strategy, content strategy, CRM, site, mobile, LBM, applications, in-store, experiential, etc etc etc. Again, I’m not a master at executing all of these things - I’m just aware of what they all do, how they all work, and the role they play in creating an integrated experience.
So, Digital Strategy is Transportation Planning. This is my answer next time I have the ‘what does that mean?’ conversation.
Publishing as conversation.
This is the generation of publishing. We can talk about social media, but at core, it’s the mass adoption of publishing and distribution as a part of everyday life, and the creation and acceptance of tools to do so.
This is the biggest shift that companies aren’t understanding: publishing isn’t only about creating a durable state to share information, anymore. Publishing has turned into a form of dialogue, enabled by the speed and ease of creation and distribution.
Blogging, and social networks like Facebook, are akin to traditional publishing, if you ignore the specific means used. That is to say, content is created, published to make it durable and shareable, and then distributed to an audience, large or small, personal or impersonal. While there is a definite back and forth here (comments, wall posts, private messages) the key focus is publishing and distribution: the framework exists as a bunch of blank spaces for you to input information, and a means to discuss and share that information. But this isn’t the game changing behavior here. This is the application of old behaviors and frameworks across new technologies; the form is new, but the human reaction makes sense once we actually figure out what we’re looking at.
Publishing as conversation is a very different thing. Twitter is an example of this, but so are message boards, the forgotten precursor to social media. These formats are focused on interaction, not about content creation. Publishing is the means of holding the conversation, but durability is an incidental benefit, not one directly tied to the way it is used. THIS is what changes everything; a conversation is now something that can be dissected, analyzed, and distributed on a segmented level. A single tweet is most often part of a wider point, exchange or idea. And we haven’t developed a standard system for tracking the connections and context of these conversations.
You can look at a Twitter feed as talking with instant replay, of sorts - a conversation or dialogue that let’s you stop at an individual moment, and examine the context, metadata, and responses to that specific element of the whole. This is on par with being able to create annotations on an article and send them to the writer, focused on a sentence rather than the whole.
Think of it as augmented conversation: much as AR is a data layer over reality, letting you add to the seen or felt with digital content and context, reactions and responses to one element of a conversation-via-publishing, expand and explore each individual subunit.
Publishing as conversation means we’ve made stream of consciousness something that can be created, challenged, and sifted through for value. We haven’t figured out how to create great content through publishing as conversation, and we haven’t really figured out how to interpret it, either.
The key point is this. We thought we’d stumbled on to a revelation when ‘internet people’ began noticing that everything is publishing, now. We missed the point entirely, as we always do: publishing no longer means what we thought it did. Publishing is breaking into many, many little pieces, and the magic is going to be in finding how these flavors of the greater concept influence, and are influenced by, human behavior.
