Archive for January, 2008

BarCampMiami participants and topics

January 15, 2008  |  Webtech  |  , , , , , , , , , ,  |  View Comments

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Social objects and the observer’s paradox

January 11, 2008  |  Mobile, Social Object, Social media  |  , , , , , ,  |  View Comments

Table of con­tents for object-centered social­ity series

  1. The use of social objects as arte­facts for iden­tity management
  2. Social objects and the observer’s paradox
  3. Social object and the object-centered environment

My pre­vi­ous post about “social objects”, described how your pro­file, what you pub­lish and what share online deter­mines the impres­sion you make and pro­vides top­ics or hooks for oth­ers to get in touch with you. The term social object is a con­ve­nient short­hand for describ­ing such hooks, which rep­re­sent many of the rea­sons peo­ple social­ize with each other online; this the­ory is referred to by soci­ol­o­gists as “object-centered sociality”.

Other ways to social­ize include phatic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, although arguably even small talk may be car­ried out for ulte­rior motives.

“No Man’s Blog” has an excel­lent analy­sis of iden­tity man­age­ment and phatic com­mu­ni­ca­tion through the use of Face­book appli­ca­tions.

Objec­tions raised

My post gar­nered excel­lent, lengthy com­ments. Refer­ring to Hugh MacLeod posts here and here, one of the com­menters, Bernard Trem­blay voices a valid, if strongly worded, objec­tion on his blog to the use of the term “Social Object”. Bernard laments that the term seems prone to prof­i­teer­ing by mar­ket­ing “snake oil salesmen”:Twitter / Bernard D. Tremblay : #matrix #borg M. Scott Peck...

The moment draws nigh when we take one more step: “you came over just to chew the fat with Pam” … right. But what hap­pens when we use “social objects” as our lens? We see that entirely social impulse in terms of trans­ac­tion … the title of the piece is “mar­ket­ing” and prop­erly so: what we’ve done here is reduced the whole to an exchange between providers and con­sum­mers [sic].

Yet the trend is clear …

There’s plenty evi­dence that brands are invest­ing heav­ily in online word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing. Accord­ing to PQ Media,

Spend­ing on word-of-mouth (WoM) mar­ket­ing jumped 35.9% in 2006 to $981.0 mil­lion and is expected to top $1 bil­lion in 2007, mak­ing it one of the fastest grow­ing alter­na­tive media seg­ments. Dri­ving the growth is the con­tin­ued con­sumer shift to alter­na­tive media and the mar­keters’ need for increased brand engage­ment and ROI. These are some of the find­ings of the first in-depth analy­sis of the emerg­ing word-of-mouth (WoM) mar­ket­ing indus­try released today by PQ Media, the lead­ing provider of alter­na­tive media econo­met­rics (www.pqmedia.com).

Help­ing to fuel this growth are a pro­jected 3.5 bil­lion brand-related con­ver­sa­tions per day in the U.S., accord­ing to Keller Fay Group, with nearly 80% of con­sumers trust­ing rec­om­men­da­tions from fam­ily, friends and “influ­en­tial” per­sons over all other forms of adver­tis­ing and marketing.

Need more evi­dence? Accord­ing to Nielsen, vehi­cle dis­cus­sions are up 40% since Jan­u­ary 2007. Inter­est­ingly, the same arti­cle dis­plays Nielsen’s “Brand Asso­ci­a­tion Map, which is a “a visu­al­iza­tion tool to map how con­sumers nat­u­rally think and talk about brands online.” This is how the social object plays out in con­ver­sa­tions. Here’s an exam­ple of a map of con­ver­sa­tions about Nike.

Pit­falls abound!

So let’s all hop on the word-of-mouth band­wagon, and let’s do it by cre­at­ing social objects for peo­ple to engage in object-oriented social­ity, but under own terms, right? Not sur­pris­ingly, this type of think­ing is fraught with pit­falls. Some exam­ples come to mind:

  • Should brands join or build social net­works? Con­sider the $2 to $3 Mil­lion “Con­nect­ing with Cook­ies” site, whose short­com­ings are described here by Kami: “Con­nect­ing with Cook­ies is pure adver­tis­ing and the site is a brochure. There is noth­ing wrong with that, but if Pep­peridge Farms was sold a social media site, this isn’t it.”

  • McDonald’s strained effort to cre­ate a Starbuck’s-like expe­ri­ence in its stores, which accord­ing to this Fast­Com­pany arti­cle, is cer­tain to bomb: “Remem­ber McPizza? Me nei­ther. I’ve read it was nei­ther bet­ter nor worse than Pizza Hut or Domino’s Pizza, but it was a mis­er­able fail­ure. Why? Because when you go into a McDonald’s, you’re going to be bul­lied out of your pizza-eating mood (assum­ing you entered with one in the first place) by the sweet stink of the flag­ship fare. The place reeks of fries and beef. McDonald’s has spent mil­lions of dol­lars devel­op­ing chem­i­cal aro­mas for its fries, burg­ers and chicken, and they are every bit as intox­i­cat­ing as they were meant to be. You know that frus­tra­tion you expe­ri­ence when you try to hum one song while another is play­ing on the radio? That very dis­so­nance was the demise of the McPizza, and will claim McCof­fee next.”

  • And more gen­er­ally, some com­pa­nies and brands are pay­ing blog­gers and social net­work­ers to advo­cate their prod­uct, for instance by using Pay-Per-Posts’ rebranded SocialSpark ser­vice (good intro­duc­tory video, though and props for the greater trans­parency with the dis­clo­sure badge). From the video: “… the per­fect way for brands who want to engage blog­gers in a more con­trolled atmos­phere” … lol. As if you could craft real con­ver­sa­tions between peo­ple to mir­ror the laun­dry deter­gent ads on TV.

Cen­sor­ing or attempt­ing to con­trol the word-of-mouth is equally mis­guided, as in the case of Microsoft doing away with the Blue Mon­ster; accord­ing to Robert Scoble: “@gap­ingvoid: yeah, some­one inside Microsoft killed the Blue Mon­ster. Sigh. Microsoft’s com­mit­tees kill every­thing cool.” The alter­na­tive would have been to let the Blue Mon­ster live its own life and retire itself when Microsoft does start chang­ing the world again.

The Observer’s Para­dox:

Zero Influ­ence points out that “Brand as a Nar­ra­tive pre­vents the Brand exist­ing as Embod­i­ment. Brands need to live within the archi­tec­ture of life, not on the per­cep­tion plane. Try­ing to get a pur­chas­ing audi­ence to care about a Brand is costly com­pared to using your Brands affor­dances to improve the infra­struc­ture of life. In this case giv­ing is cheaper than adver­tis­ing.”

In “The Gift”, Lewis Hyde makes this point by describ­ing an Eng­lish fairy tale of a …

“… Devon­shire man to whom the fairies had given an inex­haustible bar­rel of ale. Year after year the liquor ran freely. Then one day the man’s maid, curi­ous to know the cause of this extra­or­di­nary power, removed the cork from the bung hole and looked into the cask; it was full of cob­webs. When the spigot next was turned, the ale ceased to flow.

The moral is this: the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, mea­sure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing, is to step out­side the cir­cle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflect­ing on another part.”

Because life is grainy and each bit, the good and the bad, make up your expe­ri­ence. The things we love most may have lots of defects. When things are too easy, we take them for granted. And when things sound too rosy, we dis­trust them. And if you look into the source of your gift, you’ll lose the shine in your own self-consciousness.

The same thing applies when design­ing spaces for con­sumer inter­ac­tion with your social objects.

Talk­ing about Rela­tional Aes­thet­ics and art, where the audi­ence is envis­aged as a com­mu­nity, French the­o­rist Nicholas Bour­ri­aud, cura­tor at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, says,

“There are two ways of build­ing an insti­tu­tion. One way is to build a jew­elry box to present objects and the other one is to con­ceive of it as an open mar­ket where every­thing is remov­able and you can change things all the time. .…

I think that maybe the idea of being rel­e­vant, of being use­ful, of being per­ti­nent is more impor­tant to artists than just doing some­thing new .…

Ten years ago, it would have been com­pletely impos­si­ble to con­sider a DJ as an artist for exam­ple. Now, it’s nor­mal. Nobody would even think of say­ing ‘you’re already play­ing pre-existing records, so you’re not an artist.’ That’s van­ished. The idea of the artist as a kind of demi-god cre­at­ing the world from a blank sheet of paper is some­thing that has just van­ished from our every day cul­ture. The fact that the DJ or pro­gram­mer or artist uses already exist­ing forms in order to say what they want to say is some­thing that is cer­tainly the most impor­tant thing at the moment because it totally goes beyond the art world.”

If you’re a brand, con­sider becom­ing a DJ with your prod­ucts and ser­vices. There are plenty of exam­ples, includ­ing Radiohead’s lat­est album, Amazon’s cus­tomer ser­vice (“Jeff used to say that if you did some­thing good for one cus­tomer, they would tell 100 cus­tomers”), and Dell’s Ideas­t­orm.

So Design for Hack­a­bil­ity (pdf file, via PLSJ). Design for play and join your audi­ence. Just don’t make it slick and stop your bean-counting, if you want to build engag­ing expe­ri­ences with your com­mu­nity around your social objects.

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The use of social objects as artefacts for identity management

January 4, 2008  |  Social Object, Social media  |  , , , , , , ,  |  View Comments

Table of con­tents for object-centered social­ity series

  1. The use of social objects as arte­facts for iden­tity management
  2. Social objects and the observer’s paradox
  3. Social object and the object-centered environment

First, a bit of history

Before talk­ing about social objects as acces­sories for online impres­sion man­age­ment, I wanted to sur­face a bit of his­tory about the term, “Social Object”.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about object-centered social­ity, which can be thought of as “the rea­son peo­ple con­nect and social­ize with each other”, to para­phrase Jyri Enge­strom. In addi­tion to Jyri, Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid’s been post­ing lots of ideas about “Social Object”, par­tic­u­larly here and here:

“The Social Object, in a nut­shell, is the rea­son two peo­ple are talk­ing to each other, as opposed to talk­ing to some­body else. Human beings are social ani­mals. We like to social­ize. But if think about it, there needs to be a rea­son for it to hap­pen in the first place. That rea­son, that “node” in the social net­work, is what we call the Social Object.” –Gapingvoid

Hugh asked me whether there’s a link point­ing to Jyri and I con­vers­ing about social objects, as we did in Reboot7 and LesWebs3 in 2005:

Twitter / Hugh MacLeod: @alexdc Is there a link tha...
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Alas, no, there is no link: Jyri Enge­strom first blogged about object-centered social­ity before the Reboot7 con­fer­ence in Copen­hagen in mid-2005 in a blog post that referred to the ground-breaking work of soci­ol­o­gist Karin Knorr-Cetina, and that changed my under­stand­ing of online social net­work­ing. I then con­tacted Jyri, Anne Gal­loway and a few oth­ers for guid­ance on where to learn more about object-centered social­ity; I spent the next cou­ple of months devour­ing every paper I could get my hands on. I relied on friends who are pro­fes­sors in procur­ing me hard to obtain research papers. That same year, I spoke with Jyri in per­son on two occa­sions, once at Reboot 7, where he gave a great pre­sen­ta­tion on the sub­ject, and later that year at Loic’s LesWebs3 con­fer­ence in Paris. On both occa­sions, we spoke about using the term “social object” to refer to object-centered social­ity. A Google search at the time pro­duced no results; but if I am not mis­taken, the term had already been used a cou­ple of time before by soci­ol­o­gists in research papers. How did Hugh link Jyri and I? He was at both con­fer­ences as well. By way of full dis­clo­sure, I reg­is­tered the socialobject.com domain in mid-2005.

Do I believe social object is the “Future of Mar­ket­ing”, as Hugh does? Yes, I def­i­nitely believe social object design and related con­cepts have the poten­tial to fos­ter greater cus­tomer engage­ment and word-of-mouth.

Do I think I should get credit for co-coining the term? No: the term has quite prob­a­bly been in exis­tence, even if obscurely. I am glad the con­cept is finally get­ting wider play.

Social objects as arte­facts for iden­tity management

I had a con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter yes­ter­day about Sin­gel­rin­gen as a social object; it’s a catchy blue ring worn by peo­ple who are, you guessed it, single:

From the site: “By wear­ing your Sin­gel­rin­gen, you declare that it is OK to be sin­gle. You may wish to find “the one”, or you are quite sat­is­fied with life as it is. Regard­less, you will show to every­one that you accept and stand for what you are, an attrac­tive single.”

  • alexdc: so the sin­gel­rin­gen becomes the social object for con­nect­ing? sure, it’s a con­ver­sa­tion starter but something’s miss­ing, methinks
  • alexdc: @leahjones ok; to grow as social object, should have tra­di­tions rit­u­als activites or other socially con­structed fic­tions for greater meaning
  • alexdc: @kr8tr right, the mes­sage should not be “I am avail­able”; it should be let’s respect, cher­ish and cel­e­brate being single
  • alexdc: @apenny i believe the ring is no more a social object than a wed­ding ring: the con­ver­sa­tions are around the tra­di­tions of mar­riage, not ring
  • alexdc: when you meet a mar­ried per­son, you might ask how they met, where they got mar­ried, do they have chil­dren, etc … the ring is just a signal
  • alexdc: with a sin­gel­rin­gen per­son, what are con­ver­sa­tion points? there are no social norms or sin­gle insti­tu­tions around which to converse
  • alexdc: @apenny i believe social objects are enriched through socially con­structed fic­tions, sto­ries, his­tory, rit­ual, behav­ior: ring is a “signal”
  • alexdc: @lindasherman i’m not dis­put­ing sin­gel­rin­gen is a social object: it cer­tainly breaks the ice; it may grow into more sig­nif­i­cant S.O. w/ time
  • alexdc: @lindasherman if sin­gel­rin­gen is a “real-life” (as opposed to online) sub­sti­tute for Match.com, it will remain only as an ice breaker
  • alexdc:  @lindasherman if sin­gel­rin­gen wear­ers take pride in being sin­gle as a lifestyle, even tem­porar­ily, then that’s really dif­fer­ent and worthy

So Sin­gel­rin­gen serves as an acces­sory for oth­ers to rec­og­nize, like a wed­ding ring. Mal­colm Glad­well wrote about rapid cog­ni­tion in his best-selling book Blink; peo­ple make imme­di­ate judge­ments about oth­ers, about their envi­ron­ment and about sit­u­a­tions through a process called thin-slicing:

When you meet some­one for the first time, or walk into a house you are think­ing of buy­ing, or read the first few sen­tences of a book, your mind takes about two sec­onds to jump to a series of conclusions.

In this sense, Sin­gel­rin­gen is an imme­di­ately notice­able, inter­est­ing and unusual ice breaker, like Armstrong’s yel­low Live­strong bracelet. Start­ing to talk with some­one about the ring can lead to pro­longed con­ver­sa­tions about what it means to be sin­gle. And as peo­ple talk to each other about the Sin­gel­rin­gen, they con­struct their par­tic­u­lar fic­tion or story about it, which is what social objects gen­er­ally lead peo­ple to do. When you see some­one with such a ring, you will prob­a­bly thin-slice and already start to make some judgements.

Sim­i­larly, today’s New York Times has an arti­cle, “Putting Your Best Cyber­face For­wards”, about online impres­sion man­age­ment:

Keith N. Hamp­ton, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Annen­berg School for Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, said the notion of impress­ing “every­one out there” is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem of net­work­ing sites. They are designed so that mil­lions see the same image of a member.

For online impres­sion man­age­ment to be effec­tive, Mr. Hamp­ton said, the sites should be redesigned to allow peo­ple to reveal dif­fer­ent aspects of their iden­tity to dif­fer­ent users. You should be able to present one face to your boss, and another to your poker bud­dies. “We have very real rea­sons for want­ing to seg­ment our social net­work,” he said.

This makes a lot of sense. You prob­a­bly dress and behave dif­fer­ently at work than you would with your bud­dies or your fam­ily. The way oth­ers thin-slice you is depen­dent on the cloth­ing and acces­sories (arte­facts) you’re wear­ing and on your behav­ior. Just as you present dif­fer­ent sides of your­self in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions in real life, so should you be able to man­age your online per­sonas. Most social net­works don’t allow you to seg­ment your con­tacts so they see dif­fer­ent aspects of you. How­ever, you con­trol the infor­ma­tion you pub­lish and by doing so man­age your iden­tity to make an impres­sion on oth­ers. The fol­low­ing blog post illus­trates this; Red Coat, Black Coat on PSFK:

Unlike para­noid Steve [who wears a black coat to pro­tect his pri­vacy], Jill is con­sid­ered as the socially evolved. It’s not only her red coat that presents an image to the world of how she wants to be seen – Jill under­stands and manip­u­lates how the world sees her, how com­pa­nies see her, how her friends see her. Using tech­nol­ogy that was devel­oped maybe twenty years ago, Jill knows nearly every­thing every­body else knows about her. And in the same way she uses his bright red coat to make a state­ment about her­self, she man­ages the data about her­self to present the image she wants.

Infor­ma­tion is like fash­ion – to be used, shown off and even bartered with.

By using online arte­facts and acces­sories, Jill is manip­u­lat­ing social objects and sig­nal­ing to oth­ers how to con­nect with her. When you wear a Sin­gel­rin­gen or a Rolex watch in real life, you are send­ing sig­nals for oth­ers to pick up. Online, you use infor­ma­tion about your­self and per­haps pic­tures, videos, slideshows, Face­book appli­ca­tions or other object-artefacts to send sig­nals on how oth­ers should social­ize with you.

—

If you’d like to know more about social object in con­cept and prac­tice, I posted a num­ber of links on Twit­ter yes­ter­day that may be helpful:

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