From The Head Of Zeus Jones

As you may have heard, I was invited to the awesome state of Vermont by Rich Nadworny last week to give a talk at the Burlington Social Media Breakfast. Rich was an amazing host and arranged to have me and my family stay the Trapp Family Lodge which was absolutely incredible.

For those of you who are as ignorant as I am, the Trapp Family are the real family that the Sound of Music was based on. This lodge which is actually a resort has beautiful rooms, a great restaurant, acres of cross country ski trails and an awesome indoor pool with a rock-climbing area. We had a blast there and wound up spending most of the weekend at the lodge as there was so much to do. Huge thanks to all there for your hospitality.

I gave a presentation about our (Zeus Jones) take on social media which – you won’t be surprised to learn – we see as another place to do things for people, not another place to say things to them. It seemed to go well, the slides are below:

As the other presenter dropped out at the last minute the Q&A was extended a bit. There were a lot of good questions but the theme that appears to have generated the most debate was my assertion that I think most people aren’t really looking for a relationship with a company or brand. I said the same thing to the Burlington Free Press:

“I think the majority of people aren’t really looking to form a two-way relationship with a company. They want more tangible things like better service, better products, lower prices, more access, more availability, more recognition and so on,” he said. “I think social media is a perfect way to deliver a lot of these things.”

To clarify, I think it’s useful for people to have a relationship with real people inside companies that they do business with, but I think that most social media marketing is aimed at getting people to build relationships with the company or brand itself which IMHO is a mistake.

There were some interesting responses to this from a number of people here, here and here.

Technorati Tags: btvsmb, social, social media marketing, Zeus Jones

To continue on a similar theme from yesterday’s post, we are currently working through the UX on one of our projects that has a fairly unique challenge. It is designed to host conversations whose form we can’t guess at and to capture ideas about which we are equally ignorant. It is an exercise in assuming nothing and trying, as best as possible, to allow for the greatest flexibility and variety in how it’s used.

I think this is a useful exercise, not only for projects like these, but for any experiences we create. However at some point, it is impossible to be completely objective and you have to take a point of view on how you think people will behave, or on how you want people to behave in a given situation. This is when things start to get interesting because one’s assumptions of how people will behave in various situations are determined in large part by how one views people in general.

If you assume people are generally smart and resourceful, you might design in one way. If you believe that people are generally stupid and lazy, you will design in another way. As deep divisions, like these, on how we see “everyone else” are at the heart of our political debates it’s fairly clear that there isn’t one truth.

However, I think that the experiences that result from our biases contain clear evidence of our biases. Certain Microsoft UX elements (like the classic Office Clippy for example) are clear signs that the designer had grave doubts about our ability to complete many tasks within Office, and was also convinced that we were either too stupid or too scared to interact with the software through a more adult interface. Perhaps this doesn’t rise to a conscious level for most users, but I have trouble believing that the intent was not felt by most of us. We are social beings, when interacting with others, we take our cues from their body language and tone. When interacting with digital experiences, I think we take our clues for context and tone from UI and design elements and information structure.

Technorati Tags: design, digital, experience, politics, semiotics, social, UX

I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s long awaited book – You are not a gadget – a few days ago and can’t stop thinking about it. He talks (more intelligently and from a much more informed position) about a number of different things that I’ve been interested in over the past few years. For a start, the foundational premise of the book is that we are shaping the Web in ways that are destructive to our humanity and individuality.

“We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience not indirectly through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers  to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.”

I couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innovative. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the subtlety and nuance that human communication typically includes.

Lanier also views the economic underpinnings of  our progress as equally damaging. We have created an environment where no one expects to pay for anything of value and are basing all of our development upon advertising being the primary revenue source for the entire Web ecosystem:

“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists , and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.”

His big thesis, however, is that we are excusing ourselves from taking responsibility for ethics and morality on the Web by draping everything with a banner of “open,” “free,” or “populist.” For example stealing music which we would never do offline, has been given a sheen of respectability online by spinning it into a form of protest against corrupt record labels. Or the fact that we regularly celebrate hackers who are able to break into corporate networks and bring down parts of their infrastructure. Or the feting we give researchers who spend two years trying to kill people remotely via their mobile phones. We have developed a different and skewed sense of ethics and morality that also contribute to the loss of our humanity.

Technorati Tags: digital, ethics, human, humanity, jaron lanier, morality, web 2.0, you are not a gadget

As you know we’re big fans of John Grant’s thinking on Brand Molecules. I came across these this morning from a German company nouvé that advances the ball on John’s thinking in ways that I think are very useful. Check them out:

Technorati Tags: brand molecule, brands, nouvé

As you know, I’m obsessed by the way data reveal relationships that normally aren’t obvious and changes how we look at the world. Recently, a few more examples have popped up in my reading materials. First was Nurtureshock which I found fascinating. Using data from large studies, they’ve started to overturn a bunch of long-held beliefs about raising children (which also highlights another favorite theme, how we often make the wrong decisions).

On a lighter note, you probably caught this analysis on profile pics done by dating site OkCupid which revealed some pretty interesting and very funny stats on the effectiveness of different poses and facial expressions on profile pics for men and women.

It’s clear our ability to measure more accurately is changing how we look at the world. That’s why I found this article about the fact that “Intel has launched an internally developed program it calls the Value Point System to measure marketing effectiveness online,” very interesting.

According to Nancy Bhagat, Intel VP-sales and marketing group, and director-marketing strategies and campaigns, “The opportunity that online represents for us is to be able to really take a look at numbers and data to help evaluate the value we’re getting.”

Given that Intel reportedly spends around $300 million on ads per year and that it had projected online in 2009 to be around 50% of its budget, that would make for a lot of really interesting data that they will be collecting and crunching through. It will be really interesting to see what they turn up and how open they are about sharing that information.

Technorati Tags: data, intel, marketing, NORA