Search Sense

In support of Groundswell, a new book written by Forrester analysts on the phenomenon of social media, Forrester launched the Groundswell awards inviting entries that demonstrated ‘excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal’. As a search and social media-led agency, we of course didn’t miss the opportunity to highlight the exciting pilot project the team here have been working on for Channel 4.

Chosen by Channel 4 Eductaion to understand how their users were engaging with their education content online, outside of Channel 4’s online properties, we developed a unique way of measuring online behaviours and assessing the impact of different types of content. The insights gained were used to inform Channel 4 Educations’ new online game, Bow Street Runner, as well as future content strategies.

We’ve entered our Measuring Engagement project to the ‘Listening’ category which looks at campaigns that aim to find out what customers are really saying in order to understand them better.  You can read our campaign entry and add your comments on the awards site. We are always interested in feedback and would really welcome support if you are interested in what we have done for Channel 4 Education and would like to comment. You can also read the full case study on our site.  

I presented at the WARC Advertising & Consumers conference yesterday on “Social Media: Innovation and Earning Attention”.

My theme was around the need for brands’ marketing teams and agency partners to invest  resources in innovation to find new ways to engage with people in social media

One of the bonuses of speaking was that I got to hear from other  speakers like Faris Yakob, Naked’s Digital Ninja (”what happens when geeks get to make up their own job titles”), DDB’s Andreas Moellmann and Mark Earls - a celebrity in adlan, appears, though I just know him through his book Herd and blog of the same name.

(more…)

I was using Facebook this morning to look at the new Facebook chat function and I started to think about data capture and the position of power that Facebook has attained. There is an underlying commercial exchange that occurs when we opt in as nodes in a network such as Facebook - in exchange for our position as a node we hand over personal data that can then be traded as a commodity by Facebook (Beacon).

I dont know if I like that, so I started to look for the ‘answer’. I came across an excellent post by Christoper Carfi on his blog The Social Customer Manifesto. He quoted his friend who had come out with a rather nice statement:

“Networks don’t have people. People have networks” - Demian Entrekin

These 7 words encapsulate how Carfi feels that the industry will evolve.

I think this is shaped and ratified by the concepts of web 3.0 and VRM. When I say Web3.0 I refer to the description put forward by Dave McClure as “the condition which exists when someone is always ‘logged in’ on the web, and can move from site to site without ever having to re-enter a username/password.”

This is a big step from web2.0 and is the most succinct description I have read to date.

If this is combined with VRM (Vendor Relationship Managment) where individuals choose what data they allow social networks to ingest then this may well result in a power shift. Instead of individuals having to enter relationships defined and controlled (sometimes from both sides) within each network controller’s silo, we can now become the point of integration. We reclaim personally controlled approaches to relationships, including the all important privacy variables. Sounds odd but is very simple when articulated by Carfi:

“Having my information (social network connections, preferences, purchase history, etc.) stored in someone else’s silo makes no sense. Having my information stored in (literally) dozens of silos makes even less sense. (Yes, dozens. Think about it. Your information is in Facebook, and LinkedIn, and innumerable CRM systems like Salesforce — one for each vendor you deal with — and in Visa’s systems, and in…you get the point.) The right point of integration is around the individual. Each of us is at the centre of our own universe!”

Here is a slick visualisation:

At the centre of our social universe (yes I am aware the image above is technically a solar system) we reposition ourselves as the gatekeepers of our data. We begin to reduce the power disparity and minimise the in your face commericialism that threatens to taint social media (until the next evil marketing scam….).

In theory this great, but it does come with some big buts (which I like):

- we can always just not use a site if we dont like its terms

- for this to work then social sites need to develop more efficient ways to monetize their offerings (if they dont have data collaterol and display isnt bringing in the bucks) - are the days of philanthropic networking sites behind us?

- does anyone care that people sell data other than when their mates find out what xmas gift they plan to buy them?

Amazon’s web services are an intriguing hotbed of innovation. As an example take Mechanical Turk a “crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks” [Source: Wikipedia].

In essence small repetitive tasks that computers either do badly, slowly or not at all, are available for people to complete in exchange for a small financial reward. The service is setup so that programmers can incorporate people-power seamlessly into existing code. Some examples include:

• · Analysing human perceptions of colour
• · Determining the relevancy between web pages and keywords
• · Paraphrasing and rewriting product descriptions
• · Collecting 12,000 drawings of sheep facing left for your thesis
  

Don’t give up the day job just yet though, rewards for completing a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) range from $0.02 for 5 minute tasks to $75.00 for an 8 hour brain-marathon.

Why do people complete the tasks if the rewards are minimal? You’re familiar perhaps with Dr Kawashima’s recent Brain Training success – it’s made Mr Nintendo a lot of money. Where there once were crosswords and then Sudoku now there are HITs. Be it for momentary diversion, light entertainment or simple self-satisfaction, the fact is that people are actively contributing to Amazon’s hive-mind starter-kit.

It interests me because Efficient Frontier have completed tens of thousands of repetitive SEM-related tasks (eg assessing keyword relevancy) using the service, and SkyPromote apparently have a staff of 120 ‘virtual workers’. I welcome such intelligent competition and all-out innovation in our industry, but above all I’m happy to see humanity realise that for some tasks silicon still just can’t compete with a good old human brain.

Related Links:

Katharine Mieszkowski’s article posted on Life (not) as We Know It

Dolores blog – a blog all about MTurk experiments

[Photo via bistrosavage on Flickr]