Can Science Deliver The Answer To the Measurement Challenge?

(This is cross-posted at the EchoDitto Blog and the SXSW EchoDitto Blog)
Ahhhh, science.  The prospect of finding the answers to life’s most vexing challenges always seem to come from science (or faith, which in the case of online marketing and communications is important, but certainly not for everyone).  So, this morning I sat in on a panel about the ’science of designing interactions’ in the hope of getting some additional clarity on this whole measurement debate.

The panel featured two folks, either professor types or PhDs, with thick accents — usually a good sign when you are talking about a complex subject (ok, totally unfair generalization, but tell me that you don’t agree with the statement at least in part)  And, like so many other panels, this one promised metrics for determining the success of your social media/marketing efforts.

Sadly, like so many other panels, no metrics emerged.  But, all was not lost.  The moderator presented an interesting framework for ‘designing interactions,’ — seven patterns as he put it.  Those patterns are:

1 Focus on designing interactions (the goal is to have people engage - with content, with each other, etc.)

2. Build experiment and measure (there is no single answer, no right answer, no way of knowing when you are done - so keep going)

3.  Give user metrics of his standing (if you know that you are only 75% complete with a task, you will proceed through and complete the remaining 25%.  If you don’t know, how do you know if you should go forward)?

4. Help the user decide actions (guide them, explain the meaning of what they are doing)

5. Frame interactions and costs, rewards risk (give the user an opportunity to understand the implications of his/her decisions, don’t decide for them)

6. Introduce currency for interactions (reward and incentivize people to take whatever action you want)

7. Create mechanism for discovery (collect data constantly, always be learning what your audience is doing and what it means to you)

What I learned?

Try not to tackle everything at once. Break down a big problem into many smaller problems and then look to various audiences/sources for help in solving those little problems.  (The example of Amazon Turk was used to represent this concept).  This seems to be a strategic blind spot for most people trying to communicate online — they try to create the ultimate experience, the ‘do everything’ technical solution, and inevitably they fall short somewhere.  But, if you look at the individual attributes of various platforms (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) you will see lots of little successes.

There is a spectrum of activity that any user falls on — it stretches from interacting with just content (save, annotte for self, privately star, etc) moves to “mostly content” (comment, amazon review, share to audience) “some balance of both” (twitter, forward) and on the far right you get “interact with other people (wall, fan)”

And finally, focus metrics on users - at the end of the day, it is engagement we are interested in, not just activity.  We want to know where the audience stands, how to improve, and how to contribute more.  If you keep the focus narrow and deliver on  the expectations of the user, you’ll discover your metrics in there somewhere.

Getting closer to the answer.  I think.

Age of Conversation

Today marks the official release date of “Age of Conversation.”

What is that? It is a collaborative effort of 103 bloggers and online types – a book that we all co-wrote and are now beginning the effort to co-market.  It is also an experiment in distributed media, a test of whether a group is really more powerful than the individual.  The goal was painfully simple:

- Pull 100 authors together on a single project 
- The overriding topic was “The Conversation Age” — where you take it is up to you.
- The items are short - one 8.5″ x 11″ page — it can be words, diagrams, photos (again up to you).  If it is words - about 400, give or take a couple.
- We write it quickly and get it out there. We publish electronically.
- We make it available online for a small fee and we donate 100% of the proceeds to Variety the Children’s Charity — which serves children across the entire globe

It all started with an off-handed remark on a blog post and grew from there.  The credit for both launching and facilitating the project goes entirely to the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McClellan.  I have never met either, but I was honored and flattered that they would let me participate.

All signs in this suggest that this crazy little experiment will be an overwhelming success… Age of Conversation is an interesting book and will get significant attention, hopefully driving good sales. 

More information, and the option to puchase the book, is available at www.ageofconversation.com.  Go buy a copy!

SXSW Sessions 9 & 10: Quick Notes

My SXSW experience is coming to a close.  I haven’t had a chance to post notes and thoughts from the last few panels that I attended.  So, here are two quick summaries — with more to follow: 

The Rise of Blogebrity
‘Blogging celebrities’ have emerged legitimate media personalities with daily audiences equivalent to a cable show and the ability to drive mainstream interest – or kill it – with a couple of posts.  What makes a blogebrity? The panel (moderated by Kyle Bunch of Blogebrity, with Amanda Congdon from ABC News, Henry Copeland of Blogads, Karina Longworth of Netscape, Casey McKinnon of Galacticast and Nick Douglas of Look! Shiny!), which included some real-live blogebrity’s (side note: Amanda looks very different in person than she does online) said that the key to being famous on the web was not the size of your audience but your overall media savvy.  When you see bloggers on TV, writing books, being quoted in traditional press – that is when they transcend from online to having “full coverage.”

User Generated Content and Original Editorial: Friend or Foe
In the past few years, online media has embraced user generated content.  The volume and influence of user-generated content is growing and editors are trying to figure out how to integrate it effectively with original editorial content.  How can you do that?  The panel (Moderator Mike Tatum of CNET, Dave Snider of EnemyKite, Will Smith of Maximum PC Magazine, Scott Rafer of MyBlogLog, and Evan Williams of Obvious/Twitter) explained that the overall concept media must adopt is conversation.  The benefit is that the quality of the editorial gets better when your informed user base is contributing to the content.  Whether they are right or wrong, going through their arguments, reviewing their thought process helps us to think about better ways to do our own editorial job.  User generated folks can help to set the tone for the website, set the rules, find their niche and really explore it, etc.  The secret sauce is giving the top users, the most committed and insightful special access to editors, special recognition for their contribution, or something that will keep them engaged.  Additionally, while editors may be worried about bad contributions, the community very quickly will determine if someone is credible – through comments, or ratings, or similar.  When the audience figures out what they like or don’t and if someone who puts up bad information the community usually calls them out and corrects the mistakes.

SXSW Panel 8: Building a Fan Community

By Sunday afternoon I was beginning to wonder if the different panels I was sitting through were worth it.  But my perspective changed completely (for the better) when the building an online fan base panel started.  The focuse: using the internet and related technology to reach millions of fans without spending millions of dollars.  The panel (Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech moderated, Jim Miller of Brave New Foundation, Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, David Straus of Without A Box, Joe Swanberg – a filmmaker whose most recent movie is Hannah Takes the Stairs, and Lance Weiler of the Workbook Project) talked about how movies create and use MySpace pages and blogs during production, for promotion, and the role of user generated content and other activity online.

When asked what the secret was to generating online attention for movies was, like most panels, the answer to the question was “it depends” as in “it depends on the kind of movies you want to make,” or “it depends what kind of audience you want to reach” or “It depends if you have budget or not.”  The general consensus was that filmmakers and studios alike need to create immersive experiences that leverage their own dedicated channels for the movie and tap as many distribution paths and partners as possible.  And there were some interesting examples and case studies (Head Trauma and Clerks II chief among them). 

Here is a brain dump of my notes:

• MySpace is really good for connecting with people where the films are already online.  It is much harder to get someone to read about your film and then go out to a theater to watch.  If the movie is only a click away then they will be more likely to act.  Another opportunity to use social networks is to rally an audience locally (in advance of a screening or similar) to help with things like flyering.
• A consumer’s favorite film is most likely the film they haven’t seen yet. 
• The power for self-distribution is the ultimate power.  Very important to find the hook for a film/an idea and figure out how that is going to interest a certain audience and then go out to find that audience.
• The important thing is to let the right audience know why they should be interested in the film in the first place (before it is released, in some cases before it is even completed).  One of the things that social networks have allowed us to do is tap into these audiences and create a dialogue.  Social networks make spectacular audience relationship management tools.  It is one thing to build a community, let them congregate and exist on their own.  It is another thing to actually participate in that community or conversation.
• Being able to take your fan base from one film to the next is critical.  Start courting your fan base the day you start thinking about the next film you are going to make.

Closing thought: The most important thing is to make a good movie.  There is no process, no standardized set of tools that will work to promote a bad movie.  Success in building a fan base will take money and effort, time, and a little bit of luck.

SXSW Panel 7: Serious Games

Gaming is one of the fastest growing, most influential industries in the technology/entertainment space.  Most of the attention, naturally, goes towards entertainment games (first-person shooters, sports games, adventure games, etc.) because they bring in the big bucks.  But there is a whole other genre of games though that deserves all of our attention: serious games.

The panel (John Purdy of Red Knight Learning Systems, Lauren Davis of the Liemandt Foundation, Paul Medcalf of Blockdot (disclosure: I just finished working with Blockdot on the development of the LindtGoldBunny game) and Melinda Jackson of Enspire Learning) that SXSW pulled together had a lot of experience building serious games, but not a lot of insight to offer on why they work or how to make them effective.

What did they tell us?  Here is a quick brain dump from my notes:

• Serious games push an audience to learn something, or participate in some kind of engaging activity (even an engaging entertainment activity) and getting that player to the point where they are challenged, want to go back, want to be playing that game.  Of course, somewhere along the way, you learn something.  There are many different kinds of serious games: Education, Games for health, Games for change, Corporate, Military and government, Political, Healthcare, First responders and even Advergames.
• If a picture is worth a thousand words, animation is worth a thousand pictures, and a game is worth a thousand animations (i.e. a billion pictures)
• The ultimate goal is to provide a learning experience, but you have to entertain your audience if you want them to play.  You need to get that entertainment value, capitalize on the fun factor to get people in there to play (and ultimately learn).
• When a designer is putting together game components they are looking for the most addictive elements possible to engage someone.  The outcomes of a serious game are different however, because you have to make sure people learn the broader curriculum.  The game designer may have to make trade-offs and shelve something that would be more fun in favor of something that the game absolutely has to teach.  The ultimate goal is to balance them together.

SXSW Panel 6: RSS for Marketing

Sometimes you choose to attend a panel and when you get there you realize you have made a bad choice.  I think that happened to me this morning.

I was excited to learn about new ways to use RSS for marketing, and particularly to hear the group of panelists (Emily Chang from Ideacodes, Bill Flitter from  Pheedo Inc, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing (and the author of a book by the same name), Greg Reinacker from NewsGator, and moderator Tom Markiewicz frm EvolvePoint) really push the envelope and offer some fresh ideas and good suggestions for integrating RSS into communciations and marketing.

It didn’t happen.

Blame the party culture of SXSW or the daylight savings time change but there was no energy in the room.  The audience was sleepy, the conversation lacked energy.

Anyway, the most important point of the whole discussion was made during the opening remarks.  I think it was John Jantsch, possibly a team effort.  Anyway, the point was:

“It is extremely important to look at any new market, any new technology and ask yourself “How would I use that?  What would I want if I was using this technology myself (instead of trying to use it for my work)?”  At the end of the day we are just talking about sound marketing principles.  We are going talk about a technology that is a great enabler, a great innovator.  But if you have a crappy marketing message, an RSS feed is just going to make it easier for people to receive that crap.”

Here is a brain dump from the rest of my notes:

• - How do you go about explaining RSS to clients, people who don’t realize the benefits yet?  It depends on who the client is – an individual, a business (small or large), an organization with a cause instead of a product – they all have different perspectives on its value.  Everyone wants to deliver information to customers or their audience faster and RSS enables that.  In its simplest form it is just a direct information stream that goes right to your core audience whenever you want it to.  There are benefits for the user and efficiencies of the companies.
• - It doesn’t matter what we call it.  We should stop talking about the technology and approach it from the standpoint of what your organization wants to accomplish.  What result do you want?  What information do you want to share?  What experience do you want to create for your audience/customer?
• - The rate of growth for the audience using RSS is still accelerating.  Adoption is likely to continue accelerating because it is more thoroughly integrated into things like Internet Explorer v7.0.  But, most people don’t know that they are signed up for an RSS feed – they just know that they are getting information in new and compelling ways.
• - Audiences get information in a variety of ways – RSS is just one of them (voicemail, email, tv, radio, etc. are examples of others).  It is imperative that organizations easily enable all the ways that people want to get information, not just find the ones that are convenient to a company or organization.  RSS is just one piece.
• - RSS feeds can be consumed on a mobile device, or a television – you don’t control what device it might be read on so you don’t get too fancy with your formatting.  Make your feeds are readable across multiple platforms.
• Consistency is key – in format and in schedule.  People will stay subscribed as long as the content is good and there is regular delivery of information. 
   

Final thought: The panel never even came close to offering up any big opportunities for using RSS.  I have been to numerous discussions about RSS and I am starting to wonder whether any big opportunities for RSS actually exist.  Maybe RSS is just a simple tool to help address the challenge of getting content out and nothing more.  Nothing wrong with that – it can, and probably will, still revolutionize the way we distribute information line – but if that is all it should be used for, let me know.

SXSW Panel 5: Class and Design

The last discussion of the day had tremendous potential.  In the guide book, it was described as follows:

Elite web designers are baffled by the success of seemingly “undesigned” sites like Google, Craigslist, and eBay. Usablity experts explain the success of such sites as a triumph of function over style, others claim that a good business model always beats good design. This panel will investigate a third possibility: Just as Apple, BMW, and The New York Timesmarket high-end products to elite customers,Wal-Mart, Fox News, and World Wrestling Entertainment target their working-class customers very… differently. Is there a design class system?

That is an ambitious topic.  Unfortunately, I am not sure that the four panelists (Christopher Fahey from Behavior, the moderator, and Liz Danzico from Daylife, Khoi Vinh from The New York Times and Brand Louck from World Wrestling Entertainment) ever got to the heart of the discussion.  The crowd seemed pretty underwhelmed and many walked out.  But, I give the group credit for attacking a challenging and potentially controversial subject and still finding a way to offer some important comments.
Here is my brain dump from my notes:

• We use a lot of terms to talk about design.  Taste.  Good design or bad design.  Usability.  Class lets us talk about education level, economic power, cultural literacy and social standing.  People talk about class by how they designate certain activities.  And marketers talk about class through demographics, socio-economic status and something called the Hollingshead Index of Social Status
• Designers believe they are designing for their audience – most do a lot of user testing, pour over performance statistics. They don’t believe they actively consider class.  But the truth is they are, at very least, operating with in a framework that is based on class. 
• There is only so much you can learn from user research and observation.  There are gut check moments and the personal experience of the designer does come through in that effort.  And increasingly, designers are shifting away from personas and profiles to design more based on behavior.   Of course, if you have someone really visionary (like Steve Jobs) as a part of your organization, you don’t need statistics.

Closing thought: I have a perspective on how the design of websites, or promotional materials, as well as products relating to my work should look.  Nobody can tell me that they understand better how to apply a look/feel to an idea that I created – particularly when I have shaped that idea with a strategy in mind for how to reach and engage a certain audience.  And I don’t really like it when people tell me that something I think is good or interesting is not.  But I can’t put pen to paper (or mouse to screen) and produce what is floating around in my head.  And when the mass audience thinks differently then I do, I always have trouble not finding some part of their point to agree with.

That is the ultimate challenge of design, to take someone else’s vision and put it out there, all the while trying to please an audience who you may never see or meet.  What does that mean in practical terms?  The audience has a view of how their newspaper should be organized, what the websites they frequent should function like and how the products they buy should look.  There is an element of class in there for sure — if you have never experienced design that is typically associated with higher end products it is unlikely you are going to understand it the same way as someone who has been immersed in that type of design for a long time.  That shouldn’t make one perspective better or worse, just different.  And it proves the point that design is a learned experience, and consuming design is as well. 

SXSW Panel 4: The Future of Television

Almost since it was first invented, people have argued that the internet will kill television.  It hasn’t happened yet and it isn’t likely to happen any time soon.  In fact, if you listen to the panel (Jay Adelson from Revision3, Nicol Carrico from AOL, Patrick Norton from Ziff Davis, Greg Brannan and Tom Mernitt from CNET (Tom also moderated)) that I just came from, the internet, and web video in particular, will bring about all sorts of new innovation and creativity that will result in a bright new future for television.

Here is a brain dump from my notes and some other observations:

• The future of TV is not going to be one thing – it is not going to lean one way (only).  Right now, unique web video is similar to indie rock or indie music – its moved beyond access television but it is still rough, innovative.  In the near future it will start to resemble what we currently think of as television (with higher production values, more complex narratives, etc.).
• Hollywood is never going to stop making extraordinary experiences for HDTV 42-inch TVs.  But, they have to be more creative about how to apply what they currently produce for television to the different platforms. 
• Hollywood typically flocks to whatever they can make money.  Now that the advertisers have started to put serious dollars towards web video Hollywood is paying attention.
• The internet has disintermediated all the traditional media aggregators.  Viacom and other major media companies are just aggregators. Ultimately the user has choice.  Therefore, big networks are going to have to reduce their death grip and hope that their branding is good enough.  When you put out good content people will find it, and they will pass it around, and they will come back to see what else you put out because they trust that you are putting out good content.
• Sometimes its not about how big the audience is but how well you can monetize it.  In the blog and podcast space you have companies bringing groups of high performers together and leveraging their large audience to push advertisers to pay higher rates, take more risks.
• For advertising to work on the web, honesty is important.  There has to be honest commentary about a product if people are going to buy it.  That is the most simple reversal of the traditional broadcast model where commercials were designed to shift public opinion instead of tying users to products that they were interested in.
• When you make a commitment to multiple formats so you can expand the potential audience who can watch your content you will quickly have to learn how to do a lot of things technologically.  The size and bureaucracy of many large networks will prevent them from learning this efficiently  The large networks are going to have trouble being agile enough to take advantage of the changes that happen on the internet that those who are already in this space already understand.
• The big gatekeepers are going to buy up the existing innovators in the video space, and then another generation will come along, and then again.  The technology will always present new opportunities for people to be creative and relevant.  It’s a healthy innovation cycle.
• There is a place for someone to just be a guide to what is out there, without producing anything.  Adobe is trying to do it.  TV Guide is trying to do it.  Apple is trying to do it.  It is very hard to build a business model around viral marketing, or around recommendations only.  The brand equity rests with the content (and thus the producer) at some point.  And of course, users are already doing the aggregating themselves.

Final thought: The internet is not just competing with television – there are all sorts of other opportunities for people to spend their time.  The internet is not going to cut into the tv watching time all by itself (if TV doesn’t step up with better content) just as the TV won’t win back viewership from the web if the web’s content isn’t good.  The weakest link right now in terms of television are the shows that are cheap filler to generate revenue (e.g. reality television).  We will always make time to watch the shows that we want to watch, the shows that are good.  We won’t make time to watch shows that aren’t good.  It will take generations to change viewing habits. 

SXSW Panel 3: Games and Entertainment Trends

The Austin Convention Center is badly designed.  To get to my third panel of the day, about the top 5 trends for games and entertainment in the coming year, I had to take an elevator – stairs were not an option.  Since I wasn’t the only one trying to get to the panel there was a line and I was late.  Boo!

By the time I did arrive, the panelists (Robert Nashak of Yahoo! Games, Chris Charla of Foundation 9 Entertainment, Charles Merrin from Real Networks and Brian Ring from Scope Seven) had already given their introductory thoughts and were moving into the trends. 

Here is a quick brain dump from my notes along with some quick analysis (and please forgive me if I missed anything because of the elevator troubles):

Starting thought: A bad game can hurt a brand.  A good one can do a lot to help.

TREND: Games build brands
Games are moving away from straight licensing – focusing on sustaining brand awareness, sustaining relationships.   The challenge that brands face is how to use the technology to tell their whole story.  Think about it, you only have 22 characters on a cell phone to describe your game.

TREND: The rise of user generated game experiences
Doritos user-generated commercials for the Superbowl cost $12.79 to make.  The same type of effort can be used for games.  Brand see enormous potential risk when you give users an opportunity to create opportunities related to their brand (“when you give a user a pen, particularly an online pen, they seem to forget their manners”).  But, increasingly, brands are taking seriously that their customers want to co-create their brand with them… and starting to embrace that.  The focus should be on creating engines for people to build games around you brand – instead of creating games.  Then the brand can focus on moderating or supporting that activity.

TREND: Ads + Games goes premium
We are going to see serious money going into trivia and similar (i.e. casual games) as an extension of television programming (e.g. trivia during CBS broadcasts of March Madness).  There is also advergaming where the goal is not always to sell, but rather to increase awareness.

TREND: The definition of games and gamers widens broadly
Everything becomes a game.  People touch games in all sorts of ways.  There are all sorts of content (Scrabble vs. Deal or No Deal, vs. Madden vs. Fantasy Football) that people play, but when asked, they don’t think of them as game, or themselves as gamers.  As the definition expands, there is a lot more opportunity for brands to get involved.  Example: if Honda doesn’t want to reach out to the youth market they might avoid games — but games present an opportunity to promote a certain vehicle to an audience that isn’t just young.

TREND: Licensing becomes less Ad Hoc
Fragmentation of the brand may result and people will possibly suffer because of it.  There is the potential for a brand race… so many people selling their brand to different platforms that you can literally play the game monopoly on a bunch of different devices that end up competing.  Additionally, there will be brands trying to create games out of all products. 

Final thought: To make a good game is hard.  It is just as hard to make a good licensed game as it is difficult to make non-licensed game.  With or without brand doesn’t really matter.

SXSW Panel 2: New Media Goes to the Movies

The second panel that I attended today was focused on how filmmakers can use new media to produce, distribute, and market their work.  Inevitably, a good part of the discussion focused on how (or whether) small filmmakers, and particularly independent filmmakers, could compete with the millions of dollars that major studio features put behind their efforts.  Still, the panelists (David Gale from MTV New Media, Rick DeVos from Spout, Seth Nagel from iKlipz, Scilla Andreen and moderator Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech) did a pretty good job of keeping the focus broad and I found the discussion pretty engaging.

Here are some quick brain dump thoughts and analysis based on what I hear.

• In all cases, but particularly in this still emerging online film space, we have to look at what people can use to view your media on and how they use that technology.  Somebody invents a new technology every day and each one presents a new communications opportunity.  How do you produce content for a specific device?  How do you make money?  Lots of options to consider and experiment with: short-film serialized content, creating a gaming mechanism with an incentive built in for users, maybe even consider turning something that was traditional media (comic books and graphic novels, children’s books) into new media.  its all about finding new ways to tell (and sell) stories.

• The only powerplayer that people think about right now is iTunes (they are way ahead in the film distribution business, just like they were with music).  In the next year you will see a shakeout as well as a new way of determining who is a power player.  YouTube might become a distributor of films, but when you compare their quality and control with that of other systems, they have issues still to solve.  Microsoft or Sony with their game systems will become the new film distribution venues, but they have to get beyond early adopters to be more mainstream with their platforms to break through.

• Everything is so fragmented and scattered right now that trying to find the one thing that will break through - the one venue, the one format, the one model - is going to be a challenge.  The focus right now is on building a scalable platform where filmmakers and consumers can find what they want (by choosing from everything available) and watching to see what happens.  In short time, certain models will emerge as the favorites and then the energy can be focused.

• A lot of the future viewing of movies will be on portable platforms, or in immersive spaces.  We have to look at different formats.  Think in terms of bite size chunks, or virtual worlds.  Filmmakers have to change the way they think.  Technology allows you have to virtually any format that you want but you have to think seriously about how people are watching and produce experiences that align.  At some point we will find someone who can serve as the example — bootstrap a successful project (i.e. be the napoleon dynamite of the new media distribution space) and everything will flow from there.  It hasn’t happened yet.

• People don’t have enough time in life anymore… shorts are going to have a big impact, they can be appreciated like a feature because people don’t have time right now.

There is so much more that came out of this panel - little ideas, big trends, solid case studies.  I will try to update later.