facebook just works

What with blogs, MySpace pages and LinkedIn I thought I had enough going on online to not go and check out Facebook. I had a sense that it was gaining momentum after the Virgina Tech outpouring of grief happened on Facebook and not any other social networking site. So this weekend I finally got online, put up a profile and found out why this site is the future off networking.

Grant has already raised some good points about the network and interactive effects of Facebook- it is a more complete Twitter in that you can see more of what someone is doing. But there are a few more things that really struck me about the experience

a) Not allowing users to customize every aspect of the page design has meant that a person's profile is more accessible. Every time I go on go on MySpace I am blinded by ridiculously web 1.0 graphics: flashing, spinning etc.

b) For whatever reason, corporate (over) access seems to be more controlled. Where MySpace now seems be more a media channel than a networking space, Facebook has managed to keep corporate involvement to a minimum. But maybe this is because to be on Facebook a brand has to actually do something, which leads to my next point...

c) Facebook embodies brand energy. Because you see which of your friends are really active and involvement there is a perceptual premium placed on what someone does on the site vs. just being there. This is much more reflective of real relationships and the real world.

d) The site embodies the fact that work and leisure are now more tightly linked than ever. It makes business more personal and interactive and makes personal connections (however fleeting) more serious.

post office from another galaxy

spotted in Raleigh, NC - turns out to be a nice little way to sue the media you have and sell stamps

how do markets change?

Unless you're the leader in a market, change is a good thing. But despite this, we never really stop and think about when is the right time for a change and even, if a change is feasible.

All of these questions have bubbled up in my head after reading Phillip Ball's Critical Mass. Ball spends a lot of time talking about phase transitions - changes in the nature of an object that occurs frequently in nature (e.g. when something changes from a gas to a liquid) and in modern society (economic markets have be shown to undergo phase transitions.

The essence of a phase transition is that the change from one state to another happens very quickly after the substance or market reaches a critical point; until then the changes are relatively small. Interestingly, though sometimes a substance can be in a metastable state: it is past the critical point but not yet gone through the phase transition. In this state, very small things set of the phase transition.

Despite the physics, all of this resembles consumer goods markets (after all, if it fits the stock market, why not what we buy). Andrew Ehrenberg has already suggested that brand shares don't change much on a year by year basis. Intuitively, we know this is true as well - there is often a sudden shift in the market due to a new brand coming in, a price change, new technology etc.

If the parallel fits (and it has to be said that I have no proof it does), then timing and consistency matter a lot. If the market is in a meta-stable state a brand can profit from it by gently pushing it in the direction it is heading in anyway (anything from becoming a commodity to being premium). On the other hand, if it is not in a metastable state, then the brand would need to find a way to push it towards it's critical point without expecting much in ROI for the short term.

But what makes a consumer goods market metastable? In looking at the diagram's in Ball's book, i was stuck by how they looked like the diagram's of technological change in Clay Christiansen's The Innovators Dilemma - small changes followed by big disruptive ones. Again, this is just common sense - a market ready/hungry for technological change is ready for a jump. But what if boredom, or set expectations defined metastability? At the very least, it would give us the mandate we needed to create large amounts of change.

social investing

With sites like Zopa beginning to facilitate the flow of capital between consumers, it was only a matter off time before a site encouraged the flow of financial knowledge or know how between people.

Covestor allows people to share information about the trades they make and compare how they are doing relative to peeople on the site. Better yet, the site allows you track someone else's portfolio by investing a fictitious amount of money in their portfolio. By sharing ideas and track records investors can learn, improve and eventually earn money (the site will give peoplee an option to charge for access to their portfolio).

The site has all the hallmarks of a good social media/community site - good incentives for sharing, feedback mechanisms and a mechanism for getting rid of free-loaders (the best people will start to charge if there are not many people tracking their work without giving something back). Whether or not this is the model, there is so much room to undercut money managers that some site like this will likely succeed.

more pre-testing

The pre-test debate has raged on in the last week, with the likes of Robert Heath and Eric DuPlessis joining in at Jason and Nigel Hollis's blogs.

In his comment to my earlier post on pre-testing, Nigel asked why i don't think pre-tests tell us how to make an ad better and i suppose I should have been more precise.

Pre-tests may tell us that there is an issue with an execution e.g. it is not memorable enough, people find it confusing, annoying etc. I cannot emphasize the "may" enough but won't bore anyone by repeating the arguments Jason has made about reproducing the emotion of a full-up execution or Robert Heath's re-statement of the fact that pre-tests don;t account for low involvement processing.

Rather, when there is a problem, quant does not give us sufficient latitude to ask why issues were a problem for people - it fails in its diagnostics. Was the idea something people had seen before? Why was it not ownable for the brand? Is it a strategy or execution issue? There are simply to many pre-tests that use broad brush awareness and persuasion measures to gauge a spot's success and these are of little help to the agency. Even if attribute batteries are used, the research companies rarely account for size related issues across brands.

Incidentally, i would love to ask Jon Dawson (who posted a comment on Nigel's blog). why he or others need third party validation to make a decision on which ad to run? It seems to me that the business culture we are developing is becoming so risk averse that people are afraid to make decisions without a lot of backup. Alternatively, when clients see the ads the strategy produces they realize they are not happy with the strategy but choose to test the execution rather than go back to the drawing board.

some good stuff

There are a couple of excellent discussions going on right now. Jason has put up a series of great posts about pre-testing that have even engaged Nigel Hollis at Millward Brown.

I've probably been through more pre-testing this year than I care to think about and I've found that getting into arguments about whether it predicts in market results or not are slightly besides the point. Predicting in market results is virtually impossible, whether it's with pre-testing, econometrics or voodoo. Lets also put aside the issue of whether these tests use a model of advertising that reflects reality given that this is something in flux (or that we don;t know).

Barring a real in market test (which I've gotten some of my clients to do), the best thing a pre-test might ever do is teach us how to make a spot better. After all, isn't that the role of research - to make us smarter. This is where the quant tests fall down for me. Even if I believed that they worked (I don't) they do not give us any clue about why a spot is not connecting with people. Granted, finding that out in qual means some careful probing and knowing what to listen (and not to listen) to - but at least there's a chance of doing it.

Likemind meets summer!!!!

Maybe this will make 8.30 coffee an outside event (though in SF this is unlikely).

Both Tad and I won't be able to make it but we are figuring out guest hosts as we speak.

embracing randomness

Gareth and I have begun working on a seminar for the APG conference this summer, something which has finally got me to do more digging around some of the issues on randomness and entropy that I touched on last year.

In doing that digging (and chatting with Tad ), I came across this interesting interview with Harvard economist Paul Ormerod about his book Why Most Things Fail .In the book Ormerod is drawing comparisons between the rate and pervasiveness of failure in biological systems and in the economy. He notes that despite our best efforts, failure can and will happen for the randomest of reasons and that this is a fate we need to accept.

Companies should embrace the inherent randomness that drives success and failure and that no amount of cleverness or information can overcome. The companies that are most able to explore and innovate—something akin to random mutation—and then rapidly and flexibly adapt when an innovation succeeds or fails, will do best.

Ormerod's argument is really a finding of complexity theory: in non-linear unstable systems small amounts of random noise can and do easily disrupt the way structures evolve . It's a phenomena which we can see in business if we look for examples but rarely enters our head when, literally, planning strategy.

telling a good story online..

We all are trying tell our clients story online. But how many of us would think of doing it this way.

What works here for you? Personally, I don't think it is just the simplicity/authenticity/lack of some silly sort of Flash film . It's that the narrative keeps going. I wonder if we need a little sign when we walk in everyday to remind us that not to sell so quickly and just make the "book" something we want to read. After all, how many websites that you know take this long to get to the product?

Paul Feldwick

Daniel Meija has posted an excellent interview with Paul Feldwick, ex planning supremo at DDB and a former mentee of Stanley Pollitt.

This quote (about preconceptions in agencies) was particularly revealing:

"The basic error, I believe, is that people always thinks that the advertising work thanks to the communication of a message. People have different names for this: they call it message or proposition, but the certain thing is that it is a very common belief, that this one is the most important part of a campaign, and that the message that we put in words in general has something to do with the benefits of the product to the consumer."

eBay Pop

Hot (or maybe it's lukewarm) on Google Trend's heels comes eBay Pop .I have to confess that I haven't found Google trends that helpful in what I can do, but seeing people vote with their dollars about what is popular. So unsurprisingly, you see the Wii killing PS3 and Xbox 360, but the margin the do it by (13 000 to 5 500) shows what is really going on.

thinking blogs

Gareth kindly thinks I make him think. Which now means I get to tag those five (other) people/blogs who make me think to. So step up..

Richard of Adliterate

Grant MCracken

Jeffre

Influx Insights

Charles Frith

back...kind of

I've not been posting anything for the last few weeks, mostly because of work but also because blogging suddenly seemed less important and/or interesting. I even stopped reading my RSS feeds for the past few weeks, so coming back to them today was interesting.

Sure, there was stuff I'd missed e.g. Henry Jenkins analysis of YouTube or the usual brilliance from David Armano . But overall, I had not missed being part of a conversation or any earth shattering debate or hearing any news). One the one hand this is entirely normal (its just planning...) and comforting (I can be allowed to be swamped and not feel I am missing out). On the other, it reminds me of the blogosphere's place in all of this - that despite it's future it is still only one channel, and one that depends on a small number of contributors.

Noah has been pondering network effects again, so it's worth remembering that in the scale of things, the blogger "network" is still pretty small.