Category Archives: Social Media

The Facebook Personality Test

First published February 2, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve always believed that you could learn everything you needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. To back up the efficacy of this bulletproof psychological profiling tool, there are several online Beatle personality tests.  I mean really, if you can’t build an online quiz from it, how valid can a psychological tool be? I, personally, am primarily a John Lennon, with George Harrison undertones. But for the test to work, you actually have to know the Beatles on a fairly intimate level, and their status as a cultural baseline is regrettably eroding.

Now, you could use a more standard but much less interesting approach; say a Myers-Briggs personality sorter, or the “colors” test. I seem to bounce back and forth between “INFJ” and an “INTJ.”

But a recent paper by Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan Hofman (both from Boston University) in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences offered a more timely way to sort out the extroverts from the introverts (and the neurotics from the narcissists). It seems our usage of Facebook may provide a remarkably accurate glimpse into who we are.

For example, in their review of previous studies, Nadkarni and Hoffman found that people with neurotic tendencies like Facebook’s Wall, while those less neurotic prefer photos.

Several columns back I bemoaned the fact that the more we use social networking, the less social we seem to become. It appears that wasn’t just my perception. A 2009 study by E.S. Orr et al discovered that shy people love Facebook and spend way more time on it than non-shy people.  Ironically, for all the time they spend Facebooking, their friend networks are much smaller than their more gregarious but less-Facebook-engaged counterparts.

Narcissists also spend a higher-than-average amount of time on Facebook — over an hour a day.  They use the social site to promote themselves through profiles and photos. Conversely, multiple studies have shown than many Facebook fans use it to pump up low self-esteem. Through self-promotion and validation through virtual connections, they’ve found a kinder, gentle and more accepting world than the one that lies outside their bedroom door.

Studies have found that more socially awkward Facebook users have found that the less intense and demanding connections formed online can actually help them expose more of their personalities than they can in a more typical social environment. Some are more themselves on Facebook than they are in the real world. It’s not really creating a new persona, but rather exposing the one you’ve always possessed but felt too fragile to put out there in your day-to-day interactions.

Finally, what does it say about you if you use Facebook only sparingly or not at all? Are you hopelessly disconnected? Not at all. The more individualistic you are, the more goal-oriented you are and the more disciplined you are, the less you tend to use Facebook. Ironically, if this matches your personality type and you do use Facebook at all, you probably have a very healthy network of friends. I don’t know where I fall on the scale, but I probably spend less than an hour a month on Facebook — and for some reason, I seem to have a network of close to 400 friends.

Maybe it’s my irresistible INFJ/John Lennon-like qualities. I hope that doesn’t sound too narcissistic.

 

 

Why Google has to “Get” Platforms: It’s the Future of Search

First published October 27, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I shared portions of Steve Yegge’s post (from inside Google) about how Google doesn’t “get” platforms. But why, you may ask, does Google have to get better at platforms? Certainly, open platforms open greater levels of innovation, one reason why Facebook gained the critical mass needed to dominate social networking. That is certainly applicable given Google’s forays into the social space. But there’s another reason, one very germane to Google’s core business. Becoming a platform provider is likely the only way Google can compete in a new search ecosystem.

Consider this recent shot across the bow from Microsoft, which is opening the Bing backend as a service to be integrated into third-party apps. The company is making its search engine a platform. And, according to Yegge, Microsoft does “get” platforms:

“(Microsoft) understands platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you’ve never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it’s staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform.”

Now, by all competitive measures, Google is beating the Bejezus out of Bing, but pay close attention to this move, because it likely marks the future of Web search. Increasingly, we’re going to see a wider and wider gap between the back end algorithms and index of a search engine and the actual search interface. The days of a search engine being a destination are numbered. In this scenario, search becomes a utility, providing a portion of the functional underpinnings of thousands of specialized apps.  The search provider of the future will have to excel at three things:

A)   Indexing increasingly complex forms of content;

B)   Interpreting a user’s interests and intent — and then

C)   Delivering the best results given the optimum intersection between A and B.

The third part is critical, as the actual delivery point of the results moves outside the scope of the search provider and into the domain of independent developers, who will rely on robust platforms to accommodate this.

Google is the current leader in A and B, although recent work by Microsoft shows it closing the gap. But C may prove to be Google’s Achilles heel. Google will be reluctant to share its user’s eyeballs with third-party developers, because those eyeballs represent the vast majority of the company’s current revenue stream. There will be all kinds of internal pressure at Google not to head down this road. By contrast, Microsoft has nothing to lose by doing this. As Steve Yegge rightly points out, this strategy is actually a better fit for Microsoft’s corporate DNA, as the development of platforms is familiar territory for them. Being the end destination for users has never been Microsoft’s strong suit.  And Microsoft still has reams of cash coming in from other revenue channels, so it will be more likely to share the search revenue pie with other parties than will Google.

Some time ago, Steve Ballmer signaled the possibility of this shift of revenue streams coming from search.  Google was able to capitalize on a perfect storm of revenue opportunity, by tapping into the single biggest concentration of consumer demand in history. But the window of opportunity that has fueled Google’s growth to this point is rapidly closing. The new models will require search providers to slice up the revenue pie with an increasing number of partners.

It will also require those partners to wholeheartedly embrace platforms. Let’s see if Google can “get” that.

Amazon = Evolution, Google = Intelligent Design?

First published October 20, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Ironically, the hottest thing on Google+is a rant from a Google Insider about how Google+ is hopelessly limited because Google doesn’t get the importance of platforms.  Steve Yegge goes on at some length (over 4,000 words) contrasting his first six years at Amazon and his last six years at Google.

The media jumped on it, because Yegge spent some of his rant bashing Google+, which is rapidly collecting more holes than Bonnie and Clyde’s ill fated 1934 Ford sedan. But Yegge was simply using Google+ as an example of how badly Google has dropped the ball when it comes to building platforms to support external development. There are many, many things that Google does far better than Amazon (according to Yegge) but building out platforms is not one of them:

“Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.”

In contrast, Google tends to keep their code base under internal lock and key to protect their IP. In fact, even their own Chinese developers didn’t have access to Google’s core code, for fear that IP would somehow leak out and end up on a Chinese competitor’s site. A valid concern, to be sure, but that approach runs directly counter to the open environment required to become a platform developer, something that Yegge says almost everyone does better than Google:

“That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t ‘get’ platforms.

What, Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it.”

What, then, is the advantage of being a platform developer?  For one thing, it leverages the power of Darwinian development. As long as development stays locked behind the corporate firewall, you simply can’t match the innovation that will come from an open ecosystem. This is especially true in a corporate environment where management tends towards micromanagement, true of both Amazon and Google. Bezos and Page both tend to run roughshod over internal developers, dismissing ideas out of hand and turning development into a political minefield. But Steve Bezos realized the limitations of this command and control approach.

“The other big realization he [Bezos] had was that he can’t always build the right thing.”

Every successful species evolves through a long and arduous process of trial and error. Evolution requires sheer volume, leaving the environment to be the eventual judge of success. Bezos has harnessed the same approach for Amazon. Google is instead taking an “intelligent design” approach. Personally, I much prefer Amazon’s odds for success. But they’re not the only one who has embraced Darwinian development.

In exploring the lack of momentum of Google Plus One, you have to compare against Facebook. One thing that Facebook did which helped build incredible momentum was to turn their site into a platform for social networking of all kinds.

“Facebook gets it. That’s what really worries me. That’s what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing.”

In looking at social, Google got that it was important, but what they didn’t get was that communities, whether online or in the real world, develop organically on top of required superstructures. They evolve, they aren’t created.  Facebook understands this, but Google hasn’t quite caught on yet.

“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.”

As luck would have it, Yegge also touched on the topic of last week’s column, the incredible intuition of Steve Jobs. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the same “magic” in Larry Page. Yegge seems to agree:

“The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.”

Yegge’s post is required reading, because it offers a startlingly frank and transparent view inside Google, and I applaud Google’s courage in allowing it to remain open to the public. What is really fascinating though, is what this means for the future of search and the role of Google in it. Unfortunately, I’m at my maximum word count, so I’ll explore that next week.

Google +1 Goes Critical, But Not in a Good Way

First published October 6, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I was in Minneapolis’ Mall of America and happened to wander by the new Microsoft store. The layout, the look and the feel were a near-exact clone of the very popular Apple Stores, one of which just happened to be directly across the concourse. Here, in the largest mall in the world, I had the opportunity to compare and contrast the physical embodiments of two of the most ubiquitous brands in the world.

If not for the several floor staffers in the Microsoft store, it would have been almost empty. Only one person was wandering through the aisles showcasing the latest from Redmond, significantly outnumbered by the two staffers glued to his side, as well as two more looking on over the potential buyer’s shoulder — and still one more, whom I took to be the manager, overseeing the scene from a more discreet distance.

I then swiveled 180 degrees and saw how the Apple store stacked up against the Microsoft challenger. To be fair, the store wasn’t nearly as busy as most locations I’ve been to, but even a conservative estimate would put the customer count at 15 to 20 times the sole Microsoft customer.

This brought to my mind the importance of critical mass. We humans are notoriously impressionable — especially so when being asked to adopt new things. On the average, we have more in common with sheep (or lemmings) than “lone” wolves. So critical mass becomes well, critical in determining the success of new things.  It’s called social proof, and it makes or breaks markets. All things being equal, I’m going to choose Apple over Microsoft just because I have proof than other people have done the same. Then, this movement becomes self-perpetuating. The more people who follow the herd, the more that others want to join it. It’s how we’re wired, and all the Kinect games in the world won’t be enough to fight it.

Critical mass is also vital in social networks. In fact, the concept is central to the health and continued viability of any online community. When the momentum drops, the community is on its way to being a ghost town. When’s the last time you logged onto MySpace? Or Friendster? Or, unless you live in Brazil, Orkut?

Which brings me to Google’s+1. Just a few weeks ago, Rob Garner, one of my fellow Search Insiders, was pondering what Google’s new social offering might do for search.  Millions signed onto Google’s service as soon as it went public. Critical mass seemed well on its way. If the trends held up, this could change everything.

And then it died.

It’s been 2 weeks since I received a Google+1 invite, and that came from a Google employee. There has been no reason to check my +1 circles. I really haven’t given it a thought prior to writing this column. Each and every day, I receive one or two LinkedIn invites in my inbox. I generally receive 4 to 5 Facebook invitations a week. But Google+1? Crickets.

Apparently the only ones using +1 are Google employees who are forced to if they want their bonus, wannabe programmers from India and journalists who are researching the Google+1 obituary they’re writing.

The rapid demise of Google+1 is not new in the world of social media. Other networks have followed a similar path into oblivion, although perhaps not with the same speed. It’s the dilemma of social networks, managing to get beyond the predictable burst of the early adopters and cross the chasm to mainstream usage. To date, Facebook, LinkedIn and perhaps Twitter are the only ones to have managed the chasm crossing successfully. Google+1 sputtered before it even got to the precipice.

What this means is that Google doesn’t have the critical mass of social usage to provide a signal to noise ratio clean enough to impact search rankings. Both the reach and frequency of usage is simply not high enough to make a credible social graph. Eric Schmidt tried to say that there was more than enough online social activity for everyone, but it seems we simply don’t have the patience or free time to maintain multiple social destinations. We’ll kick the tires of a newcomer, but unless it offers something substantially better than the competition, we won’t come back with any regularity.

Google desperately needed a win with +1. But based on current traffic, it seems doomed.

Just like that Microsoft store stuck across the concourse from Apple.

Each Day is a Gift

First published June 30, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m struggling with the onslaught of time. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m turning 50 in a few weeks. Maybe it’s that I attended the funeral of an old business colleague, friend and mentor who unfortunately was taken away much too early (at 66) due to Alzheimer’s. Or maybe it’s that my oldest daughter is graduating high school this week. Whatever the reason, I just want everything to slow down a little.

At the funeral, which was in a Baptist church, the pastor comforted the congregation by telling them that this life is really a trial run for the after life. The days we spend in our corporal form are “pointless… a cruel joke” with “little meaning.” He used the analogy of a dragonfly, which lives two lives, one in a larval stage as a nymph buried at the bottom of a slough (presumably analogous to our earthly stint) and the other as the aerobatic insect we’re familiar with.  He was a little shaky on his biology, but I got the point. I just don’t happen to agree with it.

I have a significantly different view of things. I think the days we spend here, each and every one of them, are precious beyond compare.  In fact, one of our company’s core values enshrines this: “Each day is a gift.” One of our staff added a fitting tag: “that’s why we call it the present.” If you believe in an afterlife, that’s fine. But don’t let that belief lift the burden from your shoulders of living each and every day to its fullest. It’s all too easy to let each precious 24-hour parcel slip away, as we get caught up in the day-to-day.

I also don’t believe our lives are pointless. Far from it. Our lives here are the whole point. At the start of each day, you’re given the chance to make a difference, to improve the world just a little bit. In Canada, the average life span of a male at birth is 78.3 years. That means, if I hit the average, in my life I’ll have 28, 579 chances to do something meaningful in my time here on earth.  I’ve already used about two thirds of those chances with questionable outcomes, but statistically speaking, I still have a little over 10,000 in my account. That, I believe, is a number I should pay close attention to, because each day, that balance declines by one.

Further, I believe that at this point in history, we can do more with each and every day than we ever could before. One person, now more than ever, can mobilize a significant force almost instantly, thanks to technology.  In last week’s column, I introduced a moral dilemma: the use of social media in rounding up the Vancouver rioters. Were we participating in the campaign out of a sense of justice or a need for revenge? Did our motivation really matter? Many of you weighed in with your opinions, which split on both sides of the question.

I’m not going to reopen the question of whether it was right or wrong. What I wanted to focus on, in light of this week’s topic, is the sheer velocity and power of the medium. Whether it was justice or revenge, the fact was that technology made the entire thing possible.

Technology puts tremendous potential power into the hands of every person, each and every day. It’s our choice how we use that power. The fact that you are reading my thoughts and opinions right now, as I sit in my office in British Columbia and you’re wherever you are, somewhere in the world, is thanks solely to technology. Without it, I wouldn’t have the opportunity.

So, how do we use that power? How did you use technology today to make a difference?  Does the fact that the five most popular Twitter users are, in order: Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, Britney Spears and Katy Perry worry you? Should it? Should we be concerned that the Dalai Lama’s website is only the 122,444th most popular site in the world and to this point, he hasn’t seen fit to tweet? Maybe it’s because he only has a little over 2,000 followers. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian is getting close to top 1000 traffic status for her website (according to Alexa) and she’s just after Katy Perry on the Twitter popularity scale with over 8 million followers. No offense to Ms. Kardashian, but I find it troubling that she has 4000 times the online audience of his Holiness.

The awesome reality is that this day, today, you and I have something no previous generation could possible imagine: access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind, the ability to connect with other minds around the world and a voice with which to say something meaningful. Today, you have an opportunity to do something with that gift. And, if you’re busy today, you’ll have tomorrow.

How could all that possibly be “pointless”?

The Vancouver Riot Social Media Backlash: Justice or Revenge?

First published June 23, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the 25 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never had to say this — indeed, I never believed I would ever say this — but last Wednesday, I was ashamed to say I live in British Columbia. I wasn’t the only one. I’m guessing the vast majority of the other 4.5 million people that call this Canadian province home felt the same way. In fact, the only people not feeling that way were the idiotic jerks that caused our collective shame. They were the ones using the Canuck’s loss to Boston in the Stanley Cup final as an excuse to wreak havoc on downtown Vancouver.

“You can’t cure stupid.”

We went into the night holding our collective breathe, hoping the sad scenario of the 1994 riot, after a similar Game 7 loss to the New York Rangers, would not repeat itself. The Olympics had given us hope that we could be placed on a world stage without burning it to the ground. But, as one police spokesperson said, “You can’t cure stupid!” Sadly, it proved to be true. B.C. is a breathtakingly beautiful corner of the world, but we definitely have our quota of stupid people, and last Wednesday, they all came onto the streets of Vancouver.

You’ve probably seen news footage of the riot and, if you were disgusted, I get it. I was too. But there’s another part of the story that also has to be told. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s a happy ending or an even sadder one. I’d like to hear what you think, but bear with me for another minute or so.

Throw the Face”Book” at them

Even though it appeared that we had learned nothing in the 17 years since the last riot, there was one significant difference between 1994 and last week’s debacle. This year, it went viral. Much of the mayhem was captured by photo or video. Soon, it was posted online. And that’s when something surprising happened. For most of our history as social animals, there is not much we can do when some of our herd runs amok. There are reams of research on the psychology of mobs, but one of the common themes is a feeling of invincibility that comes from being part of a faceless, mindless crowd bent on destruction. Most times, there is no response or retribution for individual perpetrators of mob violence. They get off scot free. But not this time. The mob that trashed Vancouver may have been mindless, but they certainly weren’t faceless.

The next morning, a Facebook page was started by the Vancouver police. They asked anyone with photos or videos of criminals to post them for identification. Within a few hours, the page had captured over 50,000 “likes.” Within a few days, the police had over a million pictures and 1000 hours of video uploaded. As people were recognized, they were tagged so police could follow up with charges. The Insurance Corporation of BC offered police use of their facial detection software and crooner Michael Buble, who also hails from Vancouver, even launched a newspaper campaign asking for people to turn the guilty in through social media.

Social Justice or Virtual Vigilantes?

On hearing that, I felt that finally, justice was being served. We, the often-voiceless majority of law-abiding citizens, could do our part to right the wrongs. But, were we really interested in justice, or did we just want revenge? Is there any difference between the two? One blogger, Dave.ca, said “report the rioters out of civic duty..or revenge..either is fine.” Is it? If we are holding onto moral high ground, should we rally and become a virtual “lynch” mob? It’s brand-new territory to chart, and I’m personally unsure about which is the right path to take.

Let me give you one example. One of the rioters is a provincial water polo athlete and he was soon identified online. His name was made public. His father is a doctor. Since his son’s crime was made public, the father has had to suspend his practice and the family has had to move out of their home. Other exposed rioters have been subjected to violent threats and the comment strings are riddled with utterings that are in contention with the riot itself for sheer stupidity.

When I started this column, I was convinced it was going to be a bad news, good news story, where social media would play the role of the redeemer. As I did further research on the aftermath, it seems that it’s a bad news, good news, possibly worse news story.

Much as I’d like to think differently, I’m not sure mob rule, whether it’s pursuing mindless violence, or mindless revenge, can ever be a good thing. Social media has a way of exposing all that is human, at scale, and at velocity — warts and all. How do we handle this new accountability, this new immediate transparency into the dark things we’ve always kept tucked away?

Two Sides of Social: Connecting or Disrespecting

First published May 19, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Apparently I opened a can of worms in my last column. I was talking about real-time tweeting during the Search Insider Summit, lead largely by Rob Griffin, who added additional comments after the column ran.  The collective force of the Search Insider audience jumped on Rob with a pretty unanimous condemnation of tweeting during live events. Some of the snippets:

“We are not the multitaskers we’d like to think we are. If you’re tweeting instead of listening, you may as well not be there.” – David Lott

“Save the tweets for the birds. Disrespectful is not a strong enough word.” – Paula Lynn

“Encouraging the attendees to clutch their phones, feverishly pecking out the next great tweet while viable information is being presented…is yet another segmentation of our society!” – Catherine Maino

“I teach at a university – and I ban phones in the classroom. Anyone who is typing [even 140 characters] is not listening to what is being said” – Alan Charlesworth

I’m going to steer clear of the disrespect minefield, and dig a little deeper into three of the themes introduced in these comments: multitasking, segmentation of society and the visual feedback to the presenter. I think the raw nerve struck here speaks to something foundational in how we’re reimaging social connection.

First of all, David Lott is right. We’re not the multitaskers we like to think we are. Nobody is. Attentional focus is one-mindedl we can’t pay attention to two things at once. So the brain switches back and forth. This not only impacts our tweeter, but the distraction and lack of focus can spread to the entire audience. Our language processing modules, although a wonder of evolutionary design (thank youm Noam Chomsky), are products of a one-track mind. We can’t compose our pithy tweets and focus on the message of the speaker at the same time. So, as we tweet, we temporarily “tune out” the speaker, creating a task switch in the mind. Each one of these “switches” can fragment our attention. The same is true for the rest of the audience. As we are distracted by the Twitter commentary, reading the latest “Twitticism,” we have to relegate the poor schmuck on stage to background processing.

Yes, these switches are fast and, to us, almost unnoticeable, but they do happen. Nick Carr (“The Shallows”) and others worry that this new environment of constant distraction could be turning us into a society of addle-minded wool-gatherers.

But what about  Maino’s concern about the segmentation of our society? Are we being divided into the technologically elite and Luddite plebes? Does the divide run across generational lines? Possibly. Even probably.  But I think there’s something more visceral in her protest. Has technology driven a dividing wedge in our society to the point where it’s no longer possible to gather a 100 or so souls in the same room for an hour to share a common social experience? Why can’t we  resist the urge to check emails, Facebook updates, tweets or other digital distractions? In a new world of mass collaboration and creation of content, we seem to be losing the ability to digest the message of the person standing right in front of us.

Finally, we have the firsthand experience of Charlesworth, who has felt the pain of standing in front of a digitally distracted crowd. As a person who often presents in public, I share this pain. The visual feedback speakers get is important for their own self-confidence. I’ve discovered that an audience’s concept of how to show respect to the speaker varies from culture to culture. I’ve found audiences in Northern Europe to be generally more attentive than North American audiences, who often peck away at some type of keyboard.

Even within the U.S., there are regional differences. The Midwest is more polite, the East Coast more distracted, with the West Coast hopelessly connected to a digital umbilical cord (with the worst being the engineering teams in Redmond and Mountainview, who seem unable to communicate at any level without a keyboard in front of them).

Perhaps the most disconcerting experience I had was in China, where in addition to being simultaneously translated, I was taken aback when several members of the audience started talking on their mobile phones in the middle of my presentation. If not for the fact that they did this to the other presenters as well, I would have taken it personally.

Thank goodness Twitter wasn’t around then.

New Circles of Intimacy: Presenting in the Social Sphere

First published May 12, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The recent Search Insider Summit provided me with a real-world example of how our world is connecting in new ways.

First, let me set the stage. In the conference room on Captiva Island, we had the actual attendees, usually averaging between 85 and 120 people. But the typical one-way exchange of information in most presentations was made a little less asymmetrical thanks to Twitter. The folks at MediaPost put a screen next to the stage where there was a live stream of Tweets with the #mpsis hashtag, giving us a real-time social commentary on what was happening at the front of the room. The vast majority of tweets came from people in the room (and the vast majority of these came from Rob Griffin – @telerob – who gained notoriety as the Joan Rivers of the summit for his acerbic commentary).

The addition of real-time tweet monitoring is fairly common at conferences now, but feedback seems to be mixed. I think speakers are fairly unanimous in detesting it (it can be incredibly distracting). That said, Craig Danuloff threw caution to the wind and pulled off the somewhat magical feat of presenting in person at the same time as he was tweeting tidbits from his presentation, with the help of an accomplice. But what about the audience? Does a social critique help or hinder a listener’s ability to get the most from the message being presented?

To answer that question, I did a little digging into the psychology of cheering and heckling and their impact on the dynamics of an audience. It’s the closest analogy I could think of.

Both ends of the audience participation spectrum, cheering and jeering, come from the same psychological need: to be part of something bigger than our selves. We cheer in recognition of talent, certainly, but just as often, we cheer because we want to be identified with what’s happening up on stage. It’s a “me too” type of emotional response. And these types of participatory experiences tend to go in waves. Cheering is contagious. So, it would seem, are laudatory tweets, based on the degree of retweeting I saw at the conference. It’s a digital way of saying, “I wish I had said that!”

Positive tweets raise the stature of the speaker in the eyes of the audience. The crowd is swayed to align with and respect the speaker’s opinion. The burden of social proof weighs heavily on us, as we’re not really built to go against the flow.

Heckling has a little different foundation, but it also comes from a need for control over the crowd. And it typically comes from a type A personality who is used to being the center of attention and is not comfortable relinquishing that control to another, even when that person has the stage. Heckling is intended to discredit the message of the presenter. It’s the human equivalent to two rams butting heads (and yes, hecklers are more often male) and the audience is asked to make a choice: do they side with the presenter or the challenger? If the challenger wins, the presenter goes down in flames.

This real-time exercise in social dynamics introduced an additional dimension of interest to the Search Insider conference stage. You could see some presenters being lifted in the audience’s opinion on a wave of positive tweets. But the occasional negative tweet introduced uncertainty.

The other dimension that was of interest was how the real-time social interaction took the conference beyond the walls of the South Seas Resort conference center. There were a handful of virtual attendees that appeared to follow the entire conference through the live video feed (including David Szetela, who did have to get off his porch to present on day one) and contributed their thoughts via Twitter. Then there were the inevitable nuggets that went viral. The winner in this category seems to go to Gian Fulgoni from comScore (@gfulgoni) who dropped this retweeted tidbit: LOL. Overheard at SIS: “A Starbucks barista gets more training than the average entry level ad agency employee”

The 1% of News that Matters

First published March 17, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider.

I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.

Our society digests news differently now. Electronic media paints news in broad strokes. Digital media offers a never-ending deep dive into the details. In the few days since disaster struck, the Web has already built up a vast repository of information about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The Web stretches infinitely to accommodate new content, stretching its digital boundaries as required. The shelf life of broadcast news is much shorter. Time constrains the content. Detail has to be sacrificed for impact.

But on the Web, news is also a participatory experience. News isn’t a broadcast, it’s a conversation, guided by editors and journalists but often veering in unexpected directions as our collective voice hits its stride. We shape the coverage by voicing our opinions, our concerns and, for those who are in the middle of the news, our experiences. The world is smaller, rawer, more visceral, more vital — and, hopefully, more human.

In the convergence of these two shifts in how we digest what happens in the world, there lies something impactful. Traditionally, because news was a shifting canvas where yesterday’s events quickly faded to make room for today’s, we had no choice but to move on to the next story. But now, thanks to the Web, the content remains, if we choose to seek it out. While Japan’s pain is still horribly fresh, more than a year later the traumatic story of Haiti is still unwinding online.

The fact is that 99% of the news you hear nightly won’t really make much of a difference in your life in five years. They’re stories of passing interest, but in the big scheme of things, they’re rather inconsequential. And the things that will make a difference seldom make the news. But, on the Web, the time limitation of being “new” doesn’t artificially constrain what is news. For those who continue to care about Haiti, the information is there, living on in indelible binary bits.

It’s this concept of “caring” about news that is served so well online. Humans tend to react to our surroundings in two distinct ways. We react to the immediate and awesome (in both its negative and positive connotations) simply because we’re wired to notice dramatic and potentially harmful events in our environment. But, if it has no personal impact, we move on with our lives. We’re like a herd of sheep that goes back to its collective grazing after a loud noise startles us in our pasture. For this fleeting level of engagement, broadcast news works exceedingly well. It’s been designed to impact us at this transitory level, hammering us for maximum effect by a parade of violence, negativity and trauma.

But for the 1% of stories that do affect us, that will matter to us in a very personal way in five years, the 30-second sound bite is simply not enough. If news can affect our well-being, the second level of human engagement kicks in. Now, we are hungry for information. We need to dive deep into the details, so we can understand what the personal impact might be.

Consider the difference in how I would react to the news coming out of Japan if, rather than observing it at arm’s length as I did, I had a child who was teaching English as a second language in Sendai, the epicenter of the quake. Think about how I would voraciously devour any information I could find online, trying to determine if my child was safe.

For the 1% of news that does matter to us, online provides us something we never had before. It takes the temporal and archives it at a scale never before possible. Individual slivers of history are frozen in a digital record. It allows us to connect to information that is personally relevant, even long after it qualifies as “news.”

A Search History of TED

First published March 10, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs, Calif.) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.

TED’s Back Story

The TED story, for those of you not familiar with it, is pretty amazing. TED was originally held in Monterey, Calif. in 1984, the brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks. Some of the content on that first TED stage? The unveiling of the Mac, a rep from Sony demonstrating the compact disc, Benoit Mandelbrot talking about fractals and Marvin Minsky speculating on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Due to its proximity to Silicon Valley, the conference had a decidedly tech-heavy focus. The first one lost money, and Wurman didn’t attempt another one until 1990. It was then held annually in Monterey.

In 2001, Chris Anderson took over the show and broadened the focus, adopting a more philanthropic approach. Technology still figured prominently on the TED stage, but the conference became an intellectual smorgasbord of content, with a single session known to veer from musicians to world adventurers, scientists to CEOs.

Probably the biggest change in the fortunes of TED, however, came in 2006 when the world was invited to share what happened on the TED stage. The talks were videotaped and made freely available online. And it’s here where our search story begins.

TED:TSI (TED Search Investigation)

If you use Google Insights (as I did), you see something interesting begin to happen in the search activity surrounding TED. Through 2004, 2005 and 2006, most of the search activity for TED was about the conference. There were peaks every February when the conference took place, but other than this, the volumes were pretty consistent. There was little year-over-year growth. TED remained an exclusive club for the intellectually elite. The rest of the world had never heard of it.

In 2006, when the videos were launched, a new trend began. By the end of the year, more people were using search to find the TED talks themselves than to find out about the conference. The gap continued to widen until in 2011, the search popularity of the Talks themselves is almost 3 times as much as query volume for the conference. But volumes for both have seen impressive growth. The conference rode the wave of the popularity of the videos, with query volumes over 10 times the levels seen in 2006. The videos fueled the growth of TED, making it the must see conference of the year.

The Global Mapping of TED

Another interesting trend has been to see how TED has become a global phenomenon. TED talks are most popular in Canada, followed by New Zealand, the U.S. and South Africa. They’ve also shown impressive growth in South Africa, Singapore, Australia and India. And it’s this global popularity that led TED to announce TEDx, in 2009. These are independently organized shows held around the world, with some mentorship and guidance from the TED mother ship. They have been tremendously popular — and now search volumes for TEDx have surpassed queries for the main conference.  Epicenters of the TEDx tidal wave include the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, India and Argentina.

If we drill down to the U.S., we find the greatest concentration of TEDsters (the official moniker of members of the TED community) in Oregon, Washington and Vermont. Surprisingly, California, where the conference is held, doesn’t even make the list of top TED states. Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii all beat it out. The top 10 TED states are all solidly blue (based on the last presidential election) — except for Montana.

And because Canada is such a TED hotbed (TED has an office in Vancouver) I’m proud to say that my home province of B.C. has perhaps the greatest concentration of TED fans in the world, followed by Manitoba, Alberta (which would be the Canadian equivalent of Montana) and Saskatchewan. According to Google, the TED world capital should be Victoria, B.C, which has the highest concentration of TED-related searches of any city, anywhere. The U.S. Capital? Portland, Ore. For some reason, TEDmania is very much alive and well here in the Pacific Northwest.

TED has legs!

Finally, you may ask if the wave of TED popularity is sustainable. I had this very conversation last week with another TEDster in Palm Springs. If you look at the growth of all search volumes so far in 2011, I would say the TED wave has barely begun. Volumes have skyrocketed this year in every category I looked at.  If you compare the query volume graphs to a typical S-shaped adoption curve, you would conclude that TED is just beginning a massive growth spurt.  Get used to hearing about TED, because that will be happening a lot in the future — especially if you’re visiting Victoria or Portland.