Social objects and the observer’s paradox

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”:

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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