Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Persona is Dead, Long Live the Person

First, let me go on record as saying up to this point, I’ve been a fan of personas. In my past marketing and usability work, I used personas extensively as a tool. But I’m definitely aware that not everyone is equally enamored with personas. And I also understand why.

Personas, like any tool, can be used both correctly and incorrectly. When used correctly, they can help bridge the gap between the left brain and the right brain. They live in the middle ground between instinct and intellectualism. They provide a human face to raw data.

But it’s just this bridging quality that tends to lead to abuse. On the instinct side, personas are often used as a short cut to avoid quantitative rigor. Data driven people typically hate personas for this reason. Often, personas end up as fluffy documents and life sized cardboard cutouts with no real purpose. It seems like a sloppy way to run things.

On the intellectual side, because quant people distrust personas, they also leave themselves squarely on data side of the marketing divide. They can understand numbers – people not so much. This is where personas can shine. At their best, they give you a conceptual container with a human face to put data into. It provides a richer but less precise context that allows you to identify, understand and play out potential behaviors that data alone may not pinpoint.

As I said, because personas are intended as a bridging tool, they often remain stranded in no man’s land. To use them effectively, the practitioner should feel comfortable living in this gap between quant and qual. Too far one way or the other and it’s a pretty safe bet that personas will either be used incorrectly or be discarded entirely.

Because of this potential for abuse, maybe it’s time we threw personas in the trash bin. I suspect they may be doing more harm than good to the practice of marketing. Even at their best, personas were meant as a more empathetic tool to allow you to thing through interactions with a real live person in mind. But in order to make personas play nice with real data, you have to be very diligent about continually refining your personas based on that data. Personas were never intended to be placed on a shelf. But all too often, this is exactly what happens. Usually, personas are a poor and artificial proxy for real human behaviors. And this is why they typically do more harm than good.

The holy grail of marketing would be to somehow give real time data a human face. If we could find a way to bridge left brain logic and right brain empathy in real time to discover insights that were grounded in data but centered in the context of a real person’s behaviors, marketing would take a huge leap forward. The technology is getting tantalizingly close to this now. It’s certainly close enough that it’s preferable to the much abused persona. If – and this is a huge if – personas were used absolutely correctly they can still add value. But I suspect that too much effort is spent on personas that end up as documents on a shelf and pretty graphics. Perhaps that effort would be better spent trying to find the sweet spot between data and human insights.

Mad Men: 2065

So, Don Draper is now history. Well, actually, he’s always been history. He started and finished as a half-century look back at what advertising was. Part of the appeal of Mad Men was the anthropological quaintness of the whole thing – “Can you believe they used to do that?” We, smug in our political correctness, can watch an episode secure in the knowledge that the misogynistic, substance-abusive, racist world of Sterling Cooper and Partners is long gone. The world, and with it, advertising, have come a long way!

But, one wonders, what would happen if a similar premise was launched in 2065? What about advertising now would look similarly unacceptable to viewers then?

Draper’s world was the world of the creative spark igniting the big idea. It was the world of the catchy jingle and meme-worthy slogans. The Don Drapers of the world could do no wrong great enough to tarnish the glow of their ability to blow away a client in a pitch or snag a Clio. Creative gods stood firmly astride their kingdoms on Madison Avenue.

Now, of course, we know better. Those were simpler times. Clients, and consumers, are not nearly that naïve. Today, we demand quantitative data and testing to back up our creative inspirations. It’s not just about Big Ideas. Today, advertising is also about Big Data.

But, 50 years from now, will our current preoccupation with data look anachronistic or prescient to that future audience? Are we exhibiting some equally entertaining naiveté? Will the pendulum swing back to the big idea – or will some other alternative present itself? Will data profiling, targeting and programmatic buying look as quaint then as a corny jingle and a three-martini lunch look to us now?

Advertising in the era of Don Draper had gone through its own evolution. At the turn of the century, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, a flood of new products entered the market. Advertising’s first job was to make consumers aware of new offerings, opening new markets in the process. Its primary goal was to inform.

But, by the 50’s and 60’s, mass media had made consumers aware of most product categories. Advertising’s job became to persuade consumers to purchase products they already knew existed. Its primary goal was to persuade. Market share, rather than market expansion, became the end goal. Hence the era of the big idea. You don’t need a big idea to inform, but you do need one to persuade.

Today, however, with the expanding capabilities of technology and micro-manufacturing fueling a new revolution of innovation, we may be coming back to a time where awareness is the primary concern. Advertising’s job seems to be to navigate increasingly complex filters to create awareness in increasingly targeted audiences. The era of branding that found it’s legs in the era of Don Draper already seems to be morphing into something much different that what we’ve known previously. Who knows what that will look like in another 50 years?

The thing about history is that it gives you the intellectual distance required to recognize how silly we once were. The greater the distance, the safer we feel in laughing at ourselves. In the case of advertising, 50 years seems to be an adequate buffer to feel pretty smug with our historical hindsight. Of course, if somehow you could be transported back to 1965 and talk to the average creative director at a big agency, it’s doubtful they would appreciate being enlightened about their ignorance.

So, if we project that forward to today, it makes you wonder. What are the things we do now that our grandchildren will be laughing at in 50 years?

The Mother of All Disruption

Once again fellow Online Spin author Tom Goodwin has piqued my interest. He starts to unwrap a tremendously thorny problem in his column of last Thursday – Time to Think about Regulation for Disruption. Today, I’d like to take this question up one level – do we have to rethink government entirely?

Government is almost entirely a reactionary business. Even far sighted, historic documents such as the Constitution of the United States and the Magna Carta were reactions to the untenable circumstances that preceded them. And these are the exceptions. The vast majority of governing involves a highly bureaucratic and excruciatingly slow process that attempts to respond to emerging breaches in the unspoken code of fairness that our society tries to live by. Realistically, from the time the need for a new law is recognized to the time a bill is passed, months or even years can pass.

Months or years were, practically speaking, adequate in the world we once knew. But today, that is no longer the case. In that time, complex ecosystems can establish around the breach in question, and, as Tom points out, entire industries may have been decimated in the process. This is the reality of disruption.

In a world that seeks order and governance, this is a bad thing. But, now that we have unleashed the technological Kraken, is that a world we can reasonably expect? Slowly but surely we are dismantling every aspect of our hierarchical society and replacing it with a horizontal network. Hierarchies can’t work horizontally. Something has to give.

Disruptions are a characteristic of networked structures. In order for networks to work, each component of that network has to be given the freedom to act. If the action of an individual resonates with other parts of the network, the actions are picked up and amplified. Each individual act has the potential to become a disruption – with corresponding consequences. Everything becomes accelerated in a network.

Government is built on the ideological foundation of a hierarchy. The word “government” means “to steer.” The assumption is that our society is capable of being steered. This, in turn, assumes that our society all wants to go in the same direction. But if we enforce these restrictions on a network, networks cease to work. Yes, we quell the negative disruptions, but we also eliminate the positive ones.

The United States of America is one of the least restrictive societies on the planet. The founding fathers drafted their articles to enshrine that freedom. You (as a Canadian, I have to say “you”) have managed to balance the practical necessities of government with the lack of restrictions typical of a market economy. Markets naturally emerge from networks. Because the U.S. treasures freedom and innovation, it was inevitable that it would emerge as the testing ground for the impacts of technological advances. You are the canary in the coalmine of massive disruption.

Tom urges lawmakers to become more proactive. But historically speaking, that’s just not the way government works. It’s like riding a cow in the Kentucky Derby and wondering why you can’t keep up. I just don’t think that our current hierarchical system of government is up to the job. It’s a great system, with a ton of democratic checks and balances, but it was built for a different era – one built along vertical lines.

The final issue is one of enforcement. Even if laws are passed to deal with emerging disruptions, it’s becoming almost impossible to enforce them. If lawmakers are scrambling to keep up with society, law enforcers have capitulated entirely. We just can’t afford to enforce the laws we already have on the books.

So, if this is the problem, what is the answer? I think, perhaps, it lies in the very same properties of networks. Government and laws became necessary to avoid abuses of power. Power comes from hierarchies. As societies level out the old dictates of fairness become increasingly relevant. We all have universal concepts of fairness. Abuses of what we consider to be fair are generally dealt with quickly and effectively at the network level. Networks tend to police themselves, as long as there is a common understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. In short, we have to think of regulation in terms of market and network dynamics, not hierarchical governance.

I admit this is tough to wrap your head around. In a world of disruptions, this is the Mother of all Disruption. But symptomatically speaking, it appears that our historic notion of government is ailing. As frightening as it may be to contemplate, we should start thinking about what may replace it.

Some Second Thoughts on Mindless Media

When I read Tom Goodwin’s Online Spin last week, I immediately jumped on his bandwagon. How could I not? He played the evolutionary psychology card and then trumped that by applying it to the consumption of media. This was right up my ideological alley.

addict_f1pjr6Here’s a quick recap: Humans evolved to crave high calorie foods because these were historically scarce. In the last century, however, processed food manufacturing has ensured that high calorie foods are abundantly available. The result? We got fat. Really fat. Tom worries that the same thing is happening to our consumption of media. As traditional publishing channels break down, will we become a society of information snackers?

“We’re rewarding pieces that are most-clickable or most easily digested, and our news diet shifts from good-for-us to snackable.”

Goodwin also mourns the death of serendipitous discovery – which was traditionally brought to us by our loyalty to a channel and the editorial control exercised by that channel. If we were loyal to the New York Times, then we were introduced to content they thought we should see. But in the age of “filter bubbles” our content becomes increasingly homogenized based on algorithms, which are drawing an ever-narrowing circle bounded by our explicit requests and our implicit behavior patterns. We become further insulated from quality by mindless social media sharing – which tends to favor content pandering to the lowest common denominator.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if this wasn’t a little paradoxical? Tom’s very thoughtful column, which hardly qualifies as intellectual fast-food, didn’t come to us through traditional journalism. Tom, like myself, is not a professional journalist. And while MediaPost does provide some editorial curation, it’s purpose it to provide a fairly transparent connection between industry experts like Tom and other experts like you. Tom’s piece came to us through a much more transparent information marketplace – the very same marketplace that Tom worries is turning us into an audience of mindless media junkies. And I should add that Tom’s piece was shared through social circles over 200 times.

So where is the disconnect here? The problem is that when it comes to human behaviors, there are no universal truths. How we act in almost any given situation will eventually distribute itself across a bell curve. Let’s take obesity, for instance. If we talk trends, Tom is absolutely correct. The introduction of fast food in North America coincided with an explosion of obesity, which as a percentage of the US population rose from about 10% in the 1950’s to almost 35% in 2013. But if we accept the premise that we all mindlessly crave calories, we should all be obese. Obesity rates should also continue to be going up until they reach 100% of the population. But those two things are just not true. Obesity rates have plateaued in the last few years and there are indications that they are starting to decline amongst children. Also, although fast food is now available around the world – obesity rates vary greatly. Japan has one of the highest concentrations of McDonald’s outlets per capita (25 per million) in the world but has an obesity rate of 3.2%, the lowest in all OECD countries. The US has a higher concentration McDonald’s (45 per million) but has an obesity rate 10 times that of Japan. And my own country, Canada, almost matches the US McDonald for McDonald (41 per million) but has an obesity rate half that of the US (14.3%).

My point is not to debate whether we’re getting fatter. We are. But there’s more to it than just the prevalence of fast food. And these factors apply to our consumption of media as well. For example, there is a strong negative correlation between obesity levels and education. There is also a strong negative correlation between obesity and income. Cultural norms have a huge impact on the prevalence of obesity. There are no universal truths here. There are just a lot of nebulous factors at play. So, if we want to be honest when we draw behavioral comparisons, we have to be accepting of those factors.

Much as I believe evolution drives many of our behaviors, I also believe that more open markets are better than more restrictive ones. As the mentality of abundance takes hold, our behaviors take time to adjust. Yes, we do snack on crap. But we also have access to high quality choices we could have never dreamed of before. And the ratio of consumption between those two extremes will be different for all of us. Consider the explosion of TV programming that has happened over the last 3 decades. Yes, there is an over-abundance of mindless dreck, but there is also more quality programming than ever to choose from. The same is true of music and pretty much any other category where markets have opened up through technology.

The way to increase the quality of what we consume, whether it be food, information or entertainment, is not to limit the production and distribution of those consumables through more restrictive markets, but to improve education, access and create a culture of considered consumption. Some of us will choose crap. But some of us will choose the cream that rises to the top. The choice will be ours. The answer is not to take those choices away, but rather to create a culture that encourages wiser choices.

The Secret of Successful Marketing Lies in Split Seconds

affordanceThe other day, I was having lunch in a deli. I was also watching the front door, which you had to push to get in. Almost everyone who came to the door pulled, even though there was a fairly big sign over the handle which said “Push.” The problem? The door had the wrong kind of handle. It was a pull handle, not a push. The door had been mounted backwards. In usability terms, the door handle presented a misleading affordance.

I suspect the door had been there for many years. I was at the deli for about 30 minutes. In that time, about 70% of the people (probably close to 50) pulled rather than pushed. Extrapolating this to the whole, that means over the years, thousands and thousands of people have had to try twice to enter this particular place of business. Yet, the only acknowledgement of this instance of customer pain was the sign that had been taped to the door – “Push” – and I suspect there was an implied “(You Idiot)” following that.

I suspect most marketing falls in the same category as that sign. It’s an attempt to fight the intuitive actions that customers take – those split-second actions that happen before our brain has a chance to kick in. And we have to counteract those split-second decisions because the path we have created for our customers was built without an understanding of those intuitive actions. After we realize that our path runs counter to our customer’s natural behaviors do we rebuild the path? Does the deli owner pay a contractor to remount the door? No, we post a sign asking customers to push rather than pull. After all, all they have to do is think for a moment. It seems like a reasonable request.

But here’s the problem with that. You don’t want your customers to think. You want them to act. And you want them to act as quickly and naturally as possible. The battles of marketing are won in those split seconds before the brain kicks in.

Let me give you one example. A few years ago I did a study with Simon Fraser University in Canada. We wanted to know how the brain responded in those same split seconds to brands we like versus brands we have no particular affinity to. What we found was fascinating. In about 150 milliseconds (roughly a sixth of a second) our brain responds to a well-loved brand the same way we respond to a smiling face. This all happens before any rational part of the brain can kick in. This positive reaction sets the stage for a much different subsequent mental processing of the brand (which starts at about 450 milliseconds, or half a second). And the power of this alignment can be startling. As Dr. Read Montague discovered, it can literally alter your perception of the world.

If you can rebuild your path to purchase to align with your customer’s intuitive behaviors, you don’t need to put up “push” signs when they stray off course. You don’t have to make your customers think. Here’s why that is important. As long as we operate at the intuitive level, humans are a fairly predictable lot. Evolution has wired in a number of behaviors that are universal across the population. You would not be risking your vacation fund if you placed a bet that the majority of people would try to pull a door with a door handle that suggested your should pull it, even if there was a sign that said “push.” As long as we operate on auto-pilot, we can plot a predicted behavioral course with a fair degree of confidence (assuming, of course, we’ve taken the time to understand those behaviors).

But the minute we start to think, all bets are off. The miracle of the human brain is that it has two loops of activity – one fast and one slow. The fast loop relies on instinct and evolved behavioral habits. It’s incredibly efficient but stubbornly rigid. The slow loop brings the full power of human rationality to bear on the problem. It’s what happens when we think. And once the prefrontal cortex kicks it, we are amazingly flexible but we pay the price in efficiency. It takes time to think. It also brings a massive amount of variability into the equation. If we start thinking, behaviors become much more difficult to predict.

The longer you can keep your customers on the fast path, the closer you’ll be to a successful outcome. Plan that path carefully and remove any signs telling them to “push.”

Deconstructing the Market of One

“So, what are you doing now?” My old college friend asked, right after he finished swearing at me because of my early retirement. He assumed I’d be doing something related to marketing.

“I’m starting a cycling tourism business.”

“A what…?”

“Cycling tours.”

“Do you know anything about cycling tours?”

“Not really.”

“Hmmm. Okay. Well, that’s good. It is good, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We’ll see.”

Truth be told, I’m probably getting too much pleasure from these little flashes of cognitive dissonance that happen when I tell people about my current project. I like watching as they struggle to connect the dots. Maybe it’s because it gives me some comic relief from my own struggles to connect the dots. But I’m beginning to suspect there may by a silver lining in my ignorance. Because I know so little about this business, I’m also taking a different approach to the one aspect I should know something about – the marketing of it.

Connected People in NetworkI could have jumped in and started lining up search campaigns, digging into social media targeting and setting up email campaigns. But instead, I took a step back and looked at the most successful cycling tourism operation I know – the Hotel Belvedere in Riccione, Italy. It’s become a mecca for road cyclists. This year, TripAdvisor rated it as one of the top 20 hotels in the world, based on the rave reviews of it’s cycling clientele. If you’re a road cyclist, chances are pretty good that you’ve heard of the Hotel Belvedere. And if you have heard of it, chances are extremely good that you heard about it from a friend who also cycles. The Belvedere has built its substantial business largely on word of mouth.

We all know word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising. But why is it so effective? We typically assume it’s because the message is coming from an objective source that we trust. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I think it’s because word of mouth is almost always delivered from one person to another. Word of mouth is messaging to a market of one.

There are some fundamental aspects of this that bear closer examination. Word of mouth usually occurs between friends, or, at the least, acquaintances. That means both parties have at least a passing understanding of each other. They know of common interests and personal likes and dislikes. This allows the message to be tailored for optimal reception. The most effective points of persuasion can be embellished and the least effective ones can be skimmed over. Messages are pre-filtered based on an implicit understanding of the audience.

Secondly, word of mouth advertising is based on a two-way conversation. The message evolves according to that conversation. Questions can be asked. Areas of interest can be explored more deeply. Concerns can be addressed. And, all along the way, both parties learn more about what a future engagement between the prospect and the product in question would look like.

I suspect the power of Word of Mouth comes not just in the objectivity of the sender of the message, but also in the medium in which the message is delivered (thank you Mr. McLuhan). And, if this is the case, then we should see how the strengths of that medium could be extended to other marketing efforts. We should deconstruct the advantages of targeting a Market of One.

The biggest hurdle seems to be the lack of mass normally associated with marketing. In my case, I’m actually planning for a slower approach to marketing, building allowances into the business plan for a marketing plan based on building engagements one at a time. If you’ve ever read Eric Ries’s excellent book, The Lean Start Up, you already know such things are possible. The advantage of the Market of One approach is that each encounter also provides invaluable market feedback, allowing to you to continually evolve your offering. You focus on going deep, rather than going wide. Each encounter gives you the opportunity to create a friendship.

The Messy Part of Marketing

messymarketingMarketing is hard. It’s hard because marketing reflects real life. And real life is hard. But here’s the thing – it’s just going to get harder. It’s messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been filing things away as possible topics for this column. For instance, I’ve got a pretty big file of contradicting research on what works in B2B marketing. Videos work. They don’t work. Referrals are the bomb. No, it’s content. Okay, maybe it’s both. Hmmm..pretty sure it’s not Facebook though.

The integration of marketing technology was another promising avenue. Companies are struggling with data. They’re drowning in data. They have no idea what to do with all the data that’s pouring in from smart watches and smart phones and smart bracelets and smart bangles and smart suppositories and – okay, maybe not suppositories, but that’s just because no one thought of it till I just mentioned it.

Then there’s the new Google tool that predicts the path to purchase. That sounds pretty cool. Marketers love things that predict things. That would make life easier. But life isn’t easy. So marketing isn’t easy. Marketing is all about trying to decipher the mangled mess of living just long enough to shoehorn in a message that maybe, just maybe that will catch the right person at the right time. And that mangled mess is just getting messier.

Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness. I love organic, gritty problems with no clear-cut solutions. Scientists call these ill-defined problems. And that’s why marketing is hard. It’s an ill-defined problem. It defies programmatic solutions. You can’t write an algorithm that will spit out perfect marketing. You can attack little slivers of marketing that lend themselves to clearer solutions, which is why you have the current explosion of ad-tech tools. But the challenge is trying to bring all these solutions together into some type of cohesive package that actually helps you relate to a living, breathing human.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how blissfully ignorant most marketers are about concepts that I think should be fundamental to understanding customer behaviors: things like bounded rationality, cognitive biases, decision theory and sense-making. Mention any of these things in a conference room full of marketers and watch eyes glaze over as fingers nervously thumb through the conference program, looking for any session that has “Top Ten” or “Surefire” in it’s title.

Take Information Foraging Theory, for instance. Anytime I speak about a topic that touches on how humans find information (which is almost always), I ask my audience of marketers if they’ve ever heard of I.F.T. Generally, not one hand goes up. Sometimes I think Jakob Nielsen and I are the only two people in the world that recognize I.F.T. for what it is: “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.” (Jakob’s words). If you take the time to understand this one concept I promise it will fundamentally and forever change how you look at web design, search marketing, creative and ad placement. Web marketers should be building a shrine to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. Their names should be on the tips of every marketer’s tongue. But I venture to guess that most of you reading this column never heard of them until today.

None of these fundamental concepts about human behavior are easy to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are simple to state but difficult to understand. They cover a lot of territory – much of it ill defined. I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to spread awareness of things like Information Foraging Theory. Can I always predict human behavior? Not by a long shot. But I hope that by taking the time to learn more about the classic theories of how we humans tick, I have also learned a little more about marketing. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot like being human. But I’ve always believed that to be an effective marketer, you first need to understand humans.

To the Grad Class of 2015: Don’t Rely on Planning

gradMy oldest daughter is graduating from university in a few short weeks. She’s planning for the future. Her mother and I, being practical parents, have instilled this need for planning in her. It’s what practical people do. They make plans.

I, 32 years ago, on my own graduation date – also made plans. According to my plan, I should now be a senior producer on a national Canadian TV drama. This is, of course, after working my way up as a production assistant, writer and possibly a director. But, as Helmuth von Moltke said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In my case, the enemy were the vagaries of real life. Oh – and a little thing called the Internet. In 1983, who’d have guessed that one?

In 1983, my friends in college also had plans. As far as I can tell, only one of them actually had life go somewhat according to plan. He’s the 6 o’clock news anchor in a major Canadian city. The rest of us, as near as I can figure, were pretty much blown around by the winds of fate. Not that this is a bad thing. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn’t have traded one minute of my digital marketing career for my planned career in television.

The thing is, the world changes too fast to rely on our plans. There is no way we can forecast what’s to come. For those of you who were also making plans in the 80’s, could you have possibly imagined the world we now live in? The fun of life is in discovering new opportunities we couldn’t have possibly foreseen and grasping them. In 1983, the only people who had heard of the Internet were the National Science Foundation and a few university professors. But, just a decade later, it opened a door for me that would in turn lead to an entirely new career.

That was then. This is now. If the world changed that much in the last three decades, just imagine how much it will change in the next three. Somewhere out there is the next Internet – an exponential technology that will wipe out entire industries and start new ones. Keep your eyes open for it. And when you see it, look at it as an opportunity to grow, not as a threat to your plans.

There’s an important distinction here. I’m not saying don’t plan. Planning forces you to think about the future, and that’s always a good thing. Just don’t rely on them. Be prepared to change as required.

I’m always amazed by how our lives are changed by fate. Sudden little detours get thrown in our path that forces a change of direction. And, when we look back, we realize that those little detours made all the difference. For example, I was fired from a job. It was certainly not planned. But as a result, I moved, met my wife, started a family and eventually launched a new career. Yet, at the time, it seemed that my plan for life was blown to pieces. Today, I realize it may be the single best thing that every happened to me.

In talking to my daughter and others of her generation, it seems that they get the uncertainty of the world far better than we did. Maybe it’s because they grew up in a more fluid, dynamic environment. They seem to understand that life is a series of course adjustments and corrections. When my generation graduated, we planned for a life-long career. My daughter is planning, but the plan doesn’t extend past the next year or so, at which time she’ll recalibrate. This tends to frustrate parents, but it’s probably a much more realistic view of the world.

I also realized, as I discussed post-secondary learning with my daughters, that our model of education is hopelessly locked into an outdated view of the future. It’s probably because it’s been created by a generation of linear thinkers and planners. You go to school, you get your degree, and then you go start your career. Wouldn’t it make sense to take a more iterative approach to education, turning it into a lifelong support platform for a constantly evolving plan? You go live your life, and when you take a change of course that requires more learning, you can do so easily and on your own agenda.

My advice for the Class of 2015? Plan if you must. But become a lifelong seeker of opportunity. Leave your options fluid enough to respond to fate. And realize that someday, your life will be defined by the things you never anticipated rather than by the plans you made.

Justine Sacco, Twitter and the End of Irony

Justine Sacco is in the news again. Not that she wants to. She’d like nothing more than to fade from the spotlight. As she recently said in an interview, “Someday you’ll Google me and my LinkedIn will be the first thing that pops up.” But today, over 15 months after she launched the tweet that just won’t go away, she’s still the poster child for career ruination via social media. The recent revival of Justine’s story comes ahead of the release of a new book by Jon Ronson, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.”

Justine SaccoIf you’ve never heard of Justine Sacco, I’ll recap quickly. Just before boarding an 11-hour flight to South Africa, in what can only be called a monumental melt down of discretion, she tweeted this, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” This touched off a social media feeding frenzy looking for Sacco’s blood. The world waited for her to land (#HasJustineLandedYet? became the top trender) and meet her righteous retribution.

Oh, did I mention that Justine was IAC’s Corporate Head of Communications? Yeah, I know. WTF – right?

But the point here is not whether or not Justine Sacco was wrong. I think even she’ll admit that it was a momentarily brain-dead blurb of 64-character stupidity. The point here is whether or not Sacco was a racist, cold-hearted bitch. And to that, the answer is no.  Justine meant the comment to be ironic – a satirical poke at white privilege and comfort. She never intended for it to be taken seriously. And that was where the wheels came off.

A_Modest_Proposal_1729_CoverSatire has been around for a long time. The Greeks and Romans invented it, but it was the British that perfected it. The satirical essay became an art form in the hands of Alexander Pope, John Gay and the greatest of the satirists, Jonathon Swift. Through them, irony became honed to a razor sharp scythe for social change.  Swift’s A Modest Proposal is perhaps the greatest satirical piece ever written. In it, he proposed a solution for the starving beggars of Ireland – they should sell their children, of which there was an abundant supply, to the upper classes as a food source.

Now, did the pamphlet reading public of 1729 England call for Swift’s head? Did they think he was serious when he wrote:

“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

Well, perhaps a few missed the irony, but for the vast majority of Swift’s audience, the pamphlet helped make his reputation, rather than ruin it. There was no “HasSwiftreturnedfromLilliputYet?” trend on Twitter. People got it.

There is no way Sacco’s work should be compared to Swift’s in terms of literary merit, but there are some other fundamental differences we should pay attention too.

First of all, Swift was known as a satirist. Satire was an established literary form in the Age of Enlightenment. The context was in place for the audience. They were able to manage the flip of perspective required to understand the irony. But before December 20, 2013, we had never heard of Justine Sacco. The tweet was stripped of any context. There was nothing to tell us that she wasn’t being serious. Twitter fragments our view of the world into tiny missives that float unconnected and unsupported.  Twitter, by its very nature, forces us to take its messages out of context. This is not the place to hope for a nuanced understanding.

Also, Sacco’s entire tweet totaled 64 characters. Swift’s essay comes in at 3405 words, or 19,373 characters. That’s about 300 times the literary volume of Sacco’s tweet. Swift had ample opportunity to expound on his irony and make sure readers got his point.  Even Swift’s title, at a hefty 169 characters, couldn’t have squeezed into the limits of a tweet.  Tweets beg to be taken at face value, because there’s no room to aim for anything other than that.

And that brings us to the biggest difference here – the death of thoughtfulness. You can’t get irony or satire unless you’re thoughtful. You have to spend some time thinking about what you’ve read. To use Daniel Kahneman’s terminology, you have to use System 2, which specializes in slow thinking. Sacco’s tweet takes about 2 seconds to read, from beginning to end. There is no time for thought there. But there is time for visceral reaction. That’s all System 1, and System 1 doesn’t understand irony.

At the average reading speed of 300 words a minute, you’d have to invest 11.3 minutes to get through Swift’s essay. That’s plenty of time for System 2 to digest what it’s read and to look for meaning beyond face value. You have to read it in a thoughtful manner.  But it’s not only in our reading where we don’t have to be thoughtful. We can also abandon thoughtfulness in our response. We can retweet in a matter of seconds and add our own invectives. This starts a chain reaction of indignation that starts a social media brush fire. Careful consideration is not part of the equation.

Sacco’s sin wasn’t that she was being racist. Her sin was trying to be ironic in a medium that couldn’t support it. By her own admission, she had been experimenting with Twitter to see if edgy tweets got retweeted more often. The answer, as it turned out, was yes, but the experiment damned near killed her. As a communication expert, she should have known better. Justine Sacco painfully discovered that in the split second sound-bite world of social media, thoughtful reading is extinct.  And with it, irony and satire have died as well.

Mourning Becomes Electric

dreamstime_19503560Last Friday was a sad day. A very dear and lifelong friend of mine, my Uncle Al, passed away. And so I did what I’ve done before on these occasions. I expressed my feelings by writing about it. The post went live on my blog around 10:30 in the morning. By mid afternoon, it had been shared and posted through Facebook, Twitter and many other online channels. Many were kind enough to send comments. The family, in the midst of their grief, forwarded my post to their family and friends. Soon, there was an extended network of mourning that sought to heal each other, all through channels that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Mourning had moved online.

As you probably know, I’m fascinated by how we express our innate human needs through digital technologies. And death, together with birth, is the most universal of human experiences. It was inevitable that we would use online channels to grieve. So I, as I always do, asked the question – why?

First of all – why do we mourn? Well, we mourn because we are social animals. We are probably the most social of animals. So we grieve to an according degree. We miss the departed terribly. It is natural to try to fill the hole a death tears inside of us by reaching out to others who may share the same grief. James R. Averill believed we communally mourn because it cements the social bonds that make it more likely that we will survive as a species. When it comes to dealing with death, misery loves company.

Secondly, why do we grieve online? Well, here, I think it has something to do with Granovetter’s weak ties. Death is one of those life events where we reach beyond the strong ties that define our day-to-day social existence. Certainly we seek comfort from those closest to us, but the death also triggers the existence of a virtual community – defined and united by their grieving for the one who has passed away. Our digital networks allow us to eliminate the six degrees of separation in one fell swoop. We can share our grief almost instantaneously and simultaneously with family, friends, acquaintances and even people we have never met.

There are two other aspects of grief that I believe lend themselves well to online channels: the need to chronicle and the comfort of emotional distance.

Part of the healing process is sharing memories of the departed love one. And, for those like myself, just writing about our feelings helps overcome the pain. Online provides a perfect platform for chronicling. We can share our own thoughts and, in the expressing of them, start the healing process.

The comfort of physical distance seems a contradictory idea, but almost everyone I know who has gone through a deep loss has one common dread – dealing with a never-ending stream of condolences over the coming weeks and months, triggered by each new physical encounter.

When you’ve been in the middle of the storm, you are typically a few days ahead of everyone else in dealing with your grief. Your mind has been occupied with nothing else as you have sat vigil by the hospital bed. While the condolences are given with the best of intentions, you feel compelled to give a response. The problem is, each new expression of grief forces you to replay your loop of very painful memories. The amplitude of this pain increases when it’s a face-to-face encounter. Condolences that reach you through a more detached channel, such as online, can be dealt with at your discretion. You can wait until you marshall the emotional reserves necessary to respond. You can also respond to several people at a time. How many times have you heard this from a grieving loved one, “I just wish I could record my message and play it whenever I meet someone who wants to tell me how sorry they are for my loss?” It may seem callous, but no one wants to relive that pain over and over again. And let’s face it – almost no one knows the right things to say at a moment like this.

By the end of last Friday, my online social connections had helped me ease a very deep pain. I hope I was able to return the favor for others that were dealing with their own grief. There are many things about technology that I treat with suspicion, but in this case, turning online seemed like the most natural thing in the world.