Blackbeard Blog

Study from Scientific American suggesting that if you decrease someone’s sense of proximity to a problem you’re more likely to get a creative solution. This can be by something as trivial as telling students in Indiana that the problem was formulated not in Indiana but in California.

What this made me think about was how the direction of social media is all about creating a sense of proximity - receiving stimulus from friends, and friends-of-friends, rather than strangers. Is it too much of a leap to hypothesise that, if this study is valid, this kind of proximity may be a deadening factor in people’s creativity?

(This is another angle on groupthink, I think.)

Mark Ritson says out loud what everyone I know in the biz has always thought about the Business Superbrands list - a massive country-by-country ranking of brands which shows wild fluctuations and turns ‘counter-intuitive’ into a modus operandi. For example, that thriving 21st Century powerhouse, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is in the Top 10 brands. Sorry, not brands, Superbrands Tee Emm.

Not all of the examples Ritson gives are so cutting but he hits the study’s consistency and methodology hard and well. And he also identifies one of the major problems here - the mainstream media coverage the list manages to get.

Ritson’s examples of Superbrand ranking madness sound outrageous because he’s using words like “biggest” or “most powerful”. And these, in fairness, aren’t words Superbrands itself uses. But what is it measuring? A look at Superbrands’ selection process is revealing, sort of. A Superbrand - as defined by Superbrands - “has established the finest reputation in its field”. It must meet high standards of quality, reliability and distinction.

So, no mention at all of size, or of success. Superbrands could turn around and say, “Well, Ritson’s having a go at a straw man here.”. And he is: but in doing so he’s exposing the real issue with the list.

Reading the definition makes Superbrands more comprehensible in one sense and more bizarre in another. Enc. Brit. for instance meets all the criteria and so the brand no doubt deserves a high placing, on Superbrands’ own terms. And what do those terms mean? What use are they? The media reporting the story give no indication.

Ritson hints at the bigger problem in his last paragraph: most big branding studies are struggling hard to define brands in terms of actual value, or at least equity. With marketers constantly having to justify themselves and their budgets in the boardroom this is understandable. Superbrands, though, is nothing more than a particularly skewed popularity contest: it’s like a branding equivalent of a bad “top albums ever” poll.

What’s more, it’s a step back in time to when a ‘brand’ might be nothing more than a vaporous promise of superior quality, and measurement of anything so vulgar as “equity” or “ROI” was quite infra-dig. Now actually, you might be quite nostalgic for those days - but it’s precisely because superior quality didn’t save Encyclopedia Britannica from crisis that more modern concepts of branding evolved.

Rory Sutherland, on entertaining form as ever, laments the decline of his platonic press advertising ideal. I am utterly unqualified to judge his rightness, but I did find my head nodding at this:

One problem, I think, is that people have started to conflate creativity with brevity. This is absolutely wrong. Good creative work has an immense respect for the value of the reader’s (or viewer’s) time, true, but that need not mean it is always brief: too much brevity can be as much of a discourtesy as too little.

Oh, and just to bring us back on topic, he has a little pop at research too:

Moreover every focus group nowadays contains one certified tyre-kicking twat who seeks to establish his superiority to his fellows through his disdain for all marketing. “I’m not reading all that crap” is a fairly typical way of expressing this.

Ouch!

Stephen Downes of QBrand talks about Australia’s Triple J Hottest 100, an occasional poll of the greatest songs of all time which this year ended up 95% white and around 98% male.

Some people - including Triple J on-air personnel - have defended the Hottest 100 over the last 24 hours using what I call “the Logies excuse”, i.e. that it’s a popularity contest and it’s not about merit.

Problem is, Triple J has successfully leveraged its listeners’ musical tastes for years in the form of the Hottest 100 brand. And half a million votes sounds like great level of audience engagement. But previous annual polls and compilations have never reflected such an overall narrowness of musical style and audience appeal.

So what’s happened is either:

• SAMPLING ERROR: The section of the audience voting doesn’t reflect the total audience.
• REPORTING ERROR: The use of a straight “Top 100” list only reflects the largest segment of the audience - this means of presenting the data has made other segments invisible.
• SURVEY ERROR: The section of the audience voting does reflect the total audience but the specifics of the exercise don’t get at their real taste (perhaps by using the word “greatest” instead of “favourite”, bias is being introduced)
• NO ERROR: The section of the audience voting does reflect the total audience; the specifics do reflect their real taste; and it’s the station that’s out of touch.

It’s worth pointing out that any of the first three are errors any researcher would be well-advised to guard against - especially if relying on the power of the crowd. The fourth poses a nasty dilemma: do you change to meet your audience or do you try to take your audience with you? (English DJ John Peel had similar issues, as I’ve written about at length.)

There’s some good comments on this one so go look at the permalink…

I just submitted a blog post to the new MRS thing about the Morgan Stanley teenage research sensation (and why any, y’know, actual researchers ought to be smashing their head on a wall right now), and then clicked on this link to find that Suw Charman-Anderson had said the same thing, only better and with less reliance on gags.

My gags were quite good though so I’ll still link to my version when it’s up.

I have linked this column of mine absolutely everywhere else, so Blackbeard may as well get it too. (God help you if yr following me on Friendster!)

It’s for Pitchfork, so it uses pop as a lens, but it’s also about social media, crowdsourcing and the idea of serendipity - basically, what’s the best way to get new information and perspectives into self-perpetuating (and largely oligarchic) communities?

Straw man alert!

“The public perception of Wikipedia editors and moderators is that they are an altruistic group of bright sparks who volunteer their time to expand the world’s knowledge, but…”

The public perception of Wikipedia editors is surely NO SUCH THING. Inasmuch as the public think of them at all I’d guess they would see the bad ones as single-issue lunatics and the good ones as vaguely harmless pedants.

In fact this is one of the awesome things about Wikipedia - the fact that it’s a project which has yoked a lot of individual bads (egocentricity and pedantry) into a gigantic collective good. Wikipedia is unique in that it’s a community that actually works better the more nit-pickety and humourless its members are! God bless it.

Disclosure: I am part of a WPP agency, though I have no influence whatsoever over the wider digital strategy discussed here.

Meanwhile, the world’s biggest holding company, WPP (@wpponline), has the biggest presence of its competitors, with an impressive 3,000 or so followers. Hard to understand why, though, because it follows no one back — not even its own agency brands — and the feed reads as a series of links to press releases.

This is a great example of an article turning a dogmatic view on how to use a tool into a straw man argument. Plenty of individuals at WPP agencies use Twitter. The WPP feed makes no claims to be an individual’s work - it’s a broadcast tool, a delicious-style bookmark feed, unashamedly so.

And by not following anyone back it’s actually being more honest about its status as such. Following is a promise of attention: the WPP feed has no attention to give, and thus promises none. As the Ad Age article admits, it has 3000+ followers who are presumably well aware of this - though Ad Age seems to assume they’re idiots or dupes.

You can tell this article about Second Life was on a science site not a social media one because the researchers are humble about their findings and play down the implications!

“While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence.”

Don’t be fooled though - this is some interesting and useful data mapping how “gestures” transfer from player to player (i.e. friend to friend) within Second Life. Of course it’s a big and open question whether this tells us much about real world networks (or indeed other online social nets). But the data suggests a couple of things:

- “Early adopters” and “influencers” aren’t the same thing. This isn’t new news at all but it can’t be repeated too often given that (in my experience) researchers seem to fixate on one or the other and assume they’ve got a handle on both.

- Peer-to-peer transfer is less effective at ensuring a wide distribution than promotional efforts outside the system. Again, “intuitive” but listening to a lot of social media marketers you wouldn’t think so! I wonder if this backs up the Duncan Watts hypothesis - that the best way to ensure something becomes viral is to seed it like crazy.

Longer, better expansion by danah boyd of her thoughts on this stuff. ACTUALLY IMPORTANT for social media, market research, journalism, pop culture, erm EVERYTHING I’M INTERESTED IN. Blimey.

Not everyone has the skills or understanding to engage with the public sphere in a meaningful manner. If you think that civics education is in bad shape in this country, take a look at media literacy. Digital publics combine the worst of both of these. Most of you in this room learned to use Twitter and Facebook through your friends. Collectively, you set the norms for what is appropriate among your network. If you aren’t part of these networks, these technologies may feel very foreign. I recommend each and every one of you to login to MySpace and try to make sense of it today. It will feel foreign to you because it’s not your community, it’s not your friends. Now imagine how people who aren’t like you feel when they walk into Facebook or Twitter.