There’s a very interesting post up at Psyblog about the cocktail party effect, the remarkable ability we humans have to tune into just one thread of input among many others — and tune OUT all the rest.
The most famous demonstration of this probably “did you see the moonwalking bear?” (watch it if you haven’t) — but as Psyblog points out, we probably miss much more important things all the time, while we’re paying attention to something else. The researcher who first demonstrated this effect, Colin Cherry, did it by playing two different messages simultaneously, one through each side of a pair of headphones. People had no difficulty following the stream they were asked to pay attention to, but:
Cherry found his participants picked up surprisingly little information presented to the other, ‘rejected ear’, often failing to notice blatant changes to the unattended message. When asked afterwards, participants:
- could not identify a single phrase from the speech presented to the rejected ear.
- weren’t sure the language in the rejected ear was even English.
- failed to notice when it changed to German.
- mostly didn’t notice when the speech to the rejected ear was being played backwards (though some did report that it sounded a bit strange).
The Somebody Else’s Problem Field is another example of the same phenomonen. (I know there are several very strong SEP fields active in my house right now, rendering various things that sort-of need to be done effectively invisible — what about yours?)
The interesting question, of course, is what this means for the vaunted Attention Economy. Why are we tuned into the streams we are, and what might we be missing? PsyBlog promises a series on attention, which I will pay attention to.
Here is a lovely, life-affirming idea from Gloria Steinem:
I will claim today’s pavement seed-gathering expedition with my children as my first outrageous act. And tomorrow I will plan an unrealistically ambitious fundraising campaign for Rape Crisis Cape Town.
What will you do? Ideas and feedback welcomed here and at Feministing.
It’s been an amusing morning watching the waves caused in the Twitterverse by Brian Brigg’s satirical post on Twitter’s business model. A LOT of people passed the news on without any apparent awareness that it was satire. There was concern and even outrage at the idea of 500-character tweets. Some people were doing it with tongues firmly in cheek (I think — it was hard to tell), but most seemed happy to take the “announcement” at face value.
This came hard on the heels of a whole bunch of my Facebook friends spamming me with a transparently untrue “Facebook is going to delete your account if you don’t pass this on” message. Clearly, a lot of people are in need of a refresher course in bullshit detection.
If you are one of them, here are some ways to upgrade your satire and hoax detector. Do it now, before you get caught on April 1st!
- Pay attention to your own reaction. If you read something and think “that’s the stupidest/most horrendous/most unfair idea ever, are they mad?”, pause and read it again. You may be missing something (although yes, there are lots of stupid ideas out there).
- Consider context and source. If it’s April 1st or anywhere near, be cautious. Do the same when major news “breaks” on a blog you’ve never heard of — especially if there’s a great big sign on it containing the words “geek humor”.
- Verify with the original source. I can’t begin to stress how important this is. If everybody who passed on a Microsoft/Facebook/Nokia/antivirus vendor warning took the very simple step of going to the organisation’s home page to check it out, the rest of us would be spared a lot of eye-rolling and tedious deletion. In the Twitter case, they have a blog here that they actually post news on. If anybody wasn’t sure about the premium accounts story, this should have been the first port of call.
- Don’t retweet links you haven’t read. Enough said.
(It should be noted that I learned some of this stuff the hard way. I once fell for an April Fool story saying the Table Mountain upper cable station was going to be expanded by lifting the entire structure up into the air with a crane and building a new level at the bottom. That really drummed the “check context” message home.)
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Update a few hours later — I can scarcely believe it, but people are still passing on the story even after a high-profile debunking by Techcrunch. The Twitter Search stream is worth watching.
My edited notes from WordCamp SA in Cape Town yesterday. The roundup of live Twitter coverage is here.
Vince Maher on the M&G’s blogs:
- Thought Leader worked because it has created a platform for “attention transactions” – writers are willing to trade their time and effort for attention, looking for peer recognition.
- With that as the driver, Thought Leader generated seven million words in six months — that’s worth about R4m if the content had been bought.
- Lessons: Never change the core WordPress code! And if you’re trying to build a blogging site within an existing media organisation, the job is 90% relationship building and politics and only 10% technical.
Justin Hartman on his work at Avusa’s iLab, including the blogs at The Times (I hadn’t realised until yesterday that Johnnic Communications is now Avusa. Ouch):
- Planet Blog is the Times’ answer to Thought Leader, a way to bring their celebrity journalists into the online world - Ray Hartley was the first SA editor to blog and his is still the most popular blog on the site.
- Avusa’s IT people were hugely sceptical about using WordPress and open source software, but it’s been very successful, not only on Planet Blog but also on their new multimedia portal. All the editorial teams are now on board and all the publications want blogging as part of their platform.
- Echoing Vince’s point about never changing the core code: “I hacked WP to pieces” and it’s made upgrading very difficult. They’ve since learned to leave the core alone and write plugins to do what they need.
- When they created the multimedia platform they found the available proprietary software “very limited in what it could do” — they were looking for usability and flexibility and this is what WP provided.
- “We’ve looked at lots of stuff and always come back to WordPress – I love Joomla, but for large editorial projects WordPress is the best.”
- WordPress has no database scalability issues that they’ve discovered so far — their biggest problem is that they have 20 sites on a single server doing around 100k uniques a month (!) and the number of available connections is becoming an issue.
- The entire multimedia site rolled out in three
monthsweeks, which was unheard of in the company to that point — they’d previously planned on 12-18 months to roll out a new site. People are beginning to realise that using open source = less research time, faster rollout, lots of support and plugins.
- In reply to a question whether they’re building it because they can or in response to real demand: The demand is starting to build, including from advertisers.
Matt Mullenweg (pause for geek-applause and swooning) on running an online business:
- Matt caused some excitement straight off by showing that most of the SA visits to WordPress.com (736,916 last month) are from Cape Town - but Johannesburg was second and Auckland Park, for some reason, was third. Sorry, Cape Town.
- Lots of awesome stats not all of which I was fast enough to capture (I’ll link to the presentation if it goes up anywhere). But, a sampling:
- There are 6.7 million WordPress blogs of which 2.8m are hosted at WordPress Org.
- The average blog has 4.96 active plugins and 9 installed.
- WordPress bloggers wrote 1.45 billion words in the last month he had stats for (June?).
- Selling software is dead. Or okay, dying. Even Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and is moving away from software sales as core revenue generator.
- BUT “the best way to predict the future is to invent it” – we need to embody the model of where we’re going to make it happen.
- Traditional business models are based on scarcity; what we need to do now is to embrace the economics of abundance in which value increases with each copy made (network effects etc). (I’d love to have a conversation about how this abundance meshes with a world of real physical scarcity - with luck tomorrow!)
- When you sell software bloatware is the inevitable result because you have to keep selling upgrades. But if time is the new scarcity, what succeeds will be what respects your time the most - things have to be easy to use.
- So how does Automattic make money? Here’s the conundrum: Legally a US corporation has NO responsibilities or obligations except to its shareholders to make money. So Matt had to think of a hack that would align the incentives of a US corporation with the community ethos of WordPress: they have separated the profit and non-profit sides of the business and the copyright for the software is held in the non-profit organisation. “Traditional software companies are valued on their IP, but we don’t have any. Doing it took some balls, we didn’t know what would happen, but it’s worked really well. We’ve had competitors to Wordpress.com using our own code that were actually bigger than us, but we kept iterating and growing. The one constant it that the more open I’ve been, the more success has followed.”
- Automattic makes money in five ways:
- Upgrades: When you have millions of users, if only 1% upgrade you’re doing well. But it’s not enough: We had a steep increase in page views which increased our costs very rapidly, but users didn’t increase at the same rate. So:
- Selling ads: We needed something that would scale with the page use. But there is a unique WordPress twist to this — we show ads extremely rarely. (Who’s actually seen an ad on WordPress?). You’ll see ads only if you are not logged in, you’re coming from a search engine straight to a permalink and you’re not using FireFox. (Cue applause).
- VIP hosting: A business model we stumbled into via hosting Scoble’s blog. We offer $500 a month VIP hosting to those we accept on application. Our third VIP blog was icanhascheezburger.com - people laughed at me for this, but they’re now doing over a million pageviews a day and broke our image hosting structure – over 200mb of images. Besides which, LOLcats make people happy. We’re now signing up big media (CNN, Fox News, etc) which means we’re starting to make money. Quite possibly 80% of current US election coverage is going through wordpress.com. About a third of all our traffic goes to VIP blogs.
- Akismet licences: It’s free for personal use but commercial users should pay — licences for commercial use start at US$5 a month. This is necessary for Akismet, any successful spam blocker gets mercilessly attacked and it needs ongoing development.
- So we sell: Distribution, ads, hosting, services, customisation and painkillers – not software!
- Caveats: Beware the siren song of services. What happens to your data in future? Ensure data portability, that you can take ALL your data with you if anything happens. In fact, DEMAND of your services that you can extract or back up everything daily.If I was to create a Facebook competitor, I’d start with a Facebook importer.
- Vote with your wallet. WordPress wouldn’t exist without the GPL but the price of openness is that it includes the freedom for people to do stuff you don’t like with your creations. Those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither! One of the tipping points for WP was when MoveableType changed their licence – see Mark Pilgrim’s Essay “Freedom Zero” for the details.
- Vote with your time. WordPress is a great example: We don’t need money, but we do need time. It’s not easy – but there are opportunities to become part of the community. Give it a try! If you write something, lots of people may use it.
- WordPress is just a tool, a blank page – it’s not even that interesting without plugins. It’s the users who create all the value – if I was the only one working on WordPress, none of us would be here.
Thanks, Matt!
Notes from DaveDuarte tomorrow because this is already way too long and I have to go fly painstakingly glued yoghurt-tub rockets with my kids now.
PS: Any and all factual inaccuracies, errors, spelling mistakes and other rubbish in this post are solely my own responsibility, etc. If you spot any, tell me and I’ll fix them.
I get this question a lot. It’s a question I ask of myself a lot, as well. I’m betting on the answer being yes, with some caveats depending on exactly who and where your target market is and what the best way might be to reach them. My “yes” is not yet authoritative, but it’s getting firmer by the day. I will (try to) blog the learnings as they happen. In the meantime, Chris Brogan has a great roundup of posts on this and related subjects here: Best Social Media Advice from Chris Brogan. There are especially good posts about small businesses under the “community development” and “social media” headings. I’ll be coming back to this resource.
The second day of Nomadic Marketing was considerably more difficult that the first (in a good way); a huge diversity of content, style, opinion and perspective. But if there’s one message that’s emerging clearly from absolutely everyone it’s that the rules of success in social media are not very different from the rules of success anywhere else: like it says in the heading, make good stuff, listen to people and be nice. Find people where they are, speak to them about what they need when they need it. And so on.
In a fairly fundamental way I think this is taking us back to a far older way of managing markets and conversations. Assuming the human race survives long enough to develop some good hindsight, I wouldn’t be surprised if we come to view the 20th century as a period of historical aberration during which it was briefly possible to market successfully by brute force; it was the age of broadcasting and mass communication and we’re seeing its dying spasms. What we are (re)discovering is the real import of the fact that markets are based on trust, and trust gets thinner the further it’s removed from a human face and personality.
(If it all adds up to the death of “the brand” I’ll be delighted; after all these years of talking and hearing people talk about “the brand” the phrase still makes me cringe a little.)
The conference has also so far produced a lovely small case study of the power of social media, provided people are willing to listen and respond. Paul Jacobsen Twittered dissatisfaction with service he was getting from DataPro and I passed the comments on to Duo Marketing, who passed them on to someone who could do something about it, who actually did something! Paul has the whole story here.
Yesterday’s question about how to make this all valuable to the kind of engineer- and entrepreneur-led techy companies I like to work with was also partly answered today, thanks to Mike Perk of World Wide Creative: “Just because your business is boring doesn’t mean your content has to be”. (Actually I’ve never met a really boring business yet, but it can look that way until you scratch the surface).
So all in all I’m feeling optimistic about the prospects for small, agile, responsive companies who are a) willing to listen to their customers and b) not hamstrung by their own internal bureaucracy when it comes to acting on what they hear. For the larger, lumbering types I’m not so sure. Lester alerted me to this nugget from
Seth Godin:
Organizations don’t fail because the Web and the New Marketing don’t work. They fail because the Web and the New Marketing work only when applied to the right organization. New Media makes a promise to the consumer. If the organization is unable to keep that promise, then it fails.
Which about sums it up, really.
The first day of Nomadic Marketing has been interesting and challenging in unexpected ways. On the one hand I’ve not encountered anything particularly new — in fact, one of the biggest surprises was discovering that the idea of markets as conversations is not universally accepted as blindingly obvious. Listening to various stories of corporate obliviousness has made me freshly grateful that I have very, very little to do with corporates.
On the other hand, it’s been a fantastic opportunity to play around with tools I don’t normally have time for, and to rediscover the value of some things I’d abandoned. In no particular order:
- Following very enthusiastic evangelism by Mike Stopforth, I’m playing with del.icio.us again — I managed to tag some of the more interesting URLs mentioned during the day here and will keep adding to the list over the next two days. I also (finally!) got the “social” part of social bookmarking; I still think deli.ico.us could make it a lot easer, the interface is cumbersome at present but at least the payoff is now clear to me. Does anybody still use Furl?
- Similarly, there is more interesting stuff happening in SA’s online media space than I had given it credit for; it’s clearly worth investing more time in exploring Afrigator and Amatomu; I’d (unfairly) never spared them more than a passing glance before.
- Jayne Morgan is doing fantastic work at Podcart, which I can see might work really well for a couple of my clients.
- Adii did a great job of selling me on Wordpress, which I have been feeling lukewarm about on grounds of user-unfriendliness. Fresh incentive to poke about here a bit more. I lost all my notes from his presentation to a Google Docs glitch (the danger of putting everything online) so will hope for more detail on the wiki.
Stuff I would like to see, discuss or think about over the next two days:
- I’d dearly love to know more about the Standard Bank Pro20 campaign - details of how it was built and implemented, what platforms are being used, what the feedback and results are and so on. Ditto for Standard Bank’s MXiT campaign; a live demo or screenshots at the very least would be great. If this is all too much detail for others (I’m aware my appetite for detail is not shared by everyone) I may have to interview Mike Stopforth about it…
- In fact, I’d dearly love to know more about MXiT all around; the future of social media in SA and Africa is going to be about mobile more than anything else, and it’s an area I know next to nothing about (looked at it once, didn’t really get it — clearly I have less in common with the users of MXiT than with their parents:-). Mike’s comment that today’s teenagers have skipped the web really struck home.
- There’s a big and not very well formulated question in my mind about how to make all this work for companies that are a) not consumer facing and b) not wealthy enough to employ full-time community managers etc. It obviously works very well for freelancers and small companies whose work is precisely about social media — their engagement in conversation is essential to what they do every day; but what about companies who are selling, I don’t know, fingerprint scanners or ERP software or archiving systems? I’m sure there is a way to make it work, but I also suspect it will take a different kind of thinking and engagement. People just don’t get passionate about fingerprint scanners in quite the same way they do about cricket, on the whole; and the people who do get passionate about them might not be the same as the people in a position to spend money on them (although it would be very short-sighted to ignore the people who influence the people who influence…). As I say, not a well-formulated question so if anybody can help me unpack it please do!
- On the detail front again, I’d like to know a great deal more about who is online in South Africa, what platforms they’re using, where they’re going and what they’re doing there. I’m not completely convinced by Alexa as an information source given that they base their information on users of the Alexa toolbar so there’s very likely some sample bias in there. On the other hand, maybe all this detail is simply a quick route to analysis paralysis and there’s more to be learned from just diving in and doing it.
And Dave and Adii, if you guys manage to read all this by 8am tomorrow morning I will be seriously impressed.
I was about to go to bed last night when I picked up a comment on Twitter that suggested there was something interesting going on at the SXSWi conference* in Austin, Texas, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed live on stage by a journalist called Sarah Lacy. The story in a nutshell: Many in the audience disliked her interview style, backchannel Twitter traffic got heated, there was heckling etc, it all melted down and there have about a zillion blog rehashes already so I won’t bore you with the details.
What interests me, mainly, is why I was interested. Here was a person I was vaguely aware of and whose product I recently started using, being interviewed an ocean and several timezones away by another person I’d never heard of, in front of an audience of people I’ve never met. Actual relevance to me and my life here at the nether end of a country some of them couldn’t locate on a map? Somewhere very close to zero. Yet there I was, glued to the screen & hyper-alert: palms sweating, heart racing, manically spidering my way through a sprawling web of links to find out what was going to happen next and who was saying what about it.
What is it about wasting time this way is so enormously seductive? Perhaps it has something to do with the illusion of being there, or maybe it’s the equally illusory conviction that witnessing something live is better/different than just hearing about it afterwards (as if forced exposure to Sky News at the gym hadn’t been enough to put me off the stupidity of “live coverage”). Is immediacy addictive? It certainly isn’t fulfilling (sort of like cheap chocolate: no matter how much you have it’s never entirely satisfying. Give me one square of Lindt 70% over three bars of Cadbury’s any day).
Meanwhile this sideshow has distracted me for an entire day. I know in some circles continuous partial attention is supposed to be a good thing, but the resulting continual state of jittery hyper-alertness is exhausting, and entirely inimical to flow.
I need to stay with Twitter etc for a little while longer to discover if there’s anything actually useful in it for my real needs, but it is going to need very careful management.
* Brief explanation for those who know as much about it as I knew yesterday: gathering of the uber-geeks. Everyone who is anyone on the internet, etc. Reading between the lines: lots of egos, lots of jostling, lots of parties.
This BusinessWeek piece by David Armano from last year is a useful starting point summary of the conventional wisdom on whatever this thing is that we’re talking about (what is the difference, exactly, between a “conversation economy” and an “attention economy”?)
It’s the conversation economy, stupid. One of the engines that is driving “2.0″ growth is the fact that communities are forming around popular social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ning, Twitter—the list goes on and on. These platforms facilitate conversation. Conversation leads to relationships and relationships lead to affinity.
Brand affinity, as companies such as Harley-Davidson (HOG) have proven, often drives communities to form around them. This is why anyone who plays a role in branding needs to become a conversation architect. Marketers, businesses, and designers must have an intimate understanding of how these platforms are evolving and influencing human behavior. There has to be an in-depth understanding of why some us of love to incorporate these services in our digital lives.
Long second page on the wonders of Twitter, which I am currently exploring and of which more later.
