Only Dead Fish

Minimally Invasive Education

One of the words I have a dislike for in marketing is 'educate'. Often, it is used in the context of an objective where we merely need to 'educate' our target customers/clients/prospects/colleagues of the benefits of our brand/product/service/idea and the scales will simply fall from their eyes. The people who know, simply need to show the people who don't. In my experience though, change happens more convincingly and powerfully if the person is able to get there themselves, perhaps alongside others.

I was thinking about this as I watched this quite remarkable talk by Sugata Mitra, an education scientist who has conducted a highly unusual series of real-life experiments around the world to remarkable results. Over a decade ago he began by digging a hole in a wall that bordered an urban slum in New Delhi and installing an Internet-connected PC, which he left there. A hidden camera filmed as children started playing around with the computer, learning how to go online, and then began teaching each other how to use it.

Since then, the experiments into self-supervised access, self-teaching and peer-shared knowledge have become progressively more extraordinary, and had progressively more extraordinary results. It really is worth watching to the end. Too often I think, we work from the assumption that creating change or affecting behaviour requires direct input. Sugata's grand vision (expressed by his theory that "education is a self-organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon") takes a very different view. It's one that I think we can learn a lot from. Amazing.

What Facebook Knows

"This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication" Cameron Marlow, Facebook

Social Networks are of-course giant data gathering machines, and Facebook is the bucket-wheel excavator of data. I wonder if we're even coming close to imagining the potential of how it all might be applied. 

This fascinating Technology Review piece by Tom Simonite at least hints at this potential in looking at the work of Facebook's Data Science Team, a team that is not short of raw material to mine. Facebook, he says, has 'the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behaviour'. If it were a country, it may be the 3rd largest in the world but it would also 'far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens'.

Facebook has not only the best mapping of human connections (over 125 Billion of them) we've ever had and the (sometimes in depth) profile data of almost a billion people, but data from the daily interactions and social activity of a large proportion of those users (and what Grant McCracken once called 'exhaust data'), the (now more than) 30 Billion pieces of content shared each month, the 300 million photos uploaded per day, the facial recognition, the location tagging, the historical time lines, the gaming, the app store. Then there's the 3.2 billion Likes and Comments generated by Facebook users every day and the huge distributed platform from the millions of Like buttons served up daily around the web (including, potentially, the capability to track the browsing history of Facebook users even when they're not logged on). And the frictionless sharing apps that have neatly switched the sharing default from active to passive and dramatically increased the data potential in the process. When an Austrian law student asked facebook to send him all the data they have stored about him, he was sent a CD with 1222 PDF files on it.

So Facebook knows a lot. What I find most interesting though about studies that are conducted using Facebook data is their sheer scale. The University of Milan 'four degrees of separation' study for example, that concluded that any two people on Facebook are, on average, separated by no more than 4.74 connections, was based on analysis of 69 billion friend connections among 721 million active Facebook users. Similarly, the "Gross National Happiness" behavioural model developed by the Facebook data team analysed positive and negative words in status updates from hundreds of millions of people to estimate the happiness of people on Facebook in a wide variety of different countries, with some fascinating results. And the Infomation Diversity in Networks work (that considered the role of strong and weak ties in the spread of information) used a large scale field experiment involving over 250 million people.

Clearly a big part of this is about developing new revenue generating models for Facebook so it's small wonder that the company is planning to double the headcount of the Data Science team over the next year. For me though, the really exciting potential around this unprecedented scale of data and Facebook's capability to store, structure and interogate it, is not just around the development of new kinds of business and communications models, but about how it might help advance social science and what we know about human behaviour itself.

Image courtesy

Post Of The Month - May 2012 - The Winner

It was run close by John Willshire's excellent post but in the end, the winner of Post Of The Month for May 2012 was Heidi Hackemer's deck for the Swedish APG on Planning, Creativity & Planning For Creative Campaigns. So well done Heidi. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall Of Fame. Thanks everyone for your nominations and votes this month, and don't forget to bookmark your good reads for nominating next month.

Post Of The Month - May 2012 - The Vote

Thanks for the nominations. Lots of rich thinking in the shortlist this month I think. So, our vote this month is between:

What Does Your Brand Need More Of? by Richard Huntingdon

Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things? from John Willshire

Planning, Creativity & Planning For Creative Campaigns by Heidi Hackemer

Advanced Persistent Opportunities: Building Brand Systems from Antony Mayfield

Seeing Behaviour Changes Behaviour by Faris Yakob

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Agency (and Client) from Martin Weigel

And you can vote below.

Post Of The Month - May 2012 - Nominations

I'm a few days late with this this month due to holiday (sorry) but it's time to open up for nominations for Post Of The Month - so please nominate your favourite posts that were posted in the month of May in the comments below. As always I've listed a few of my own favourites as a starter - a few decks included this time but it seemed to be a particularly good month for great decks. Please add to these and once I have a good list I'll stick them all up for a vote. So the starting four are:

What Does Your Brand Need More Of? by Richard Huntingdon

Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things? from John Willshire

Planning, Creativity & Planning For Creative Campaigns by Heidi Hackemer

Advanced Persistent Opportunities: Building Brand Systems from Antony Mayfield

And you can nominate your own choices below.

Choose Who You Spend Time With Carefully

"The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become."

I guess this should come as little surprise these days (particularly in light of all the hoo-ha around behavioural economics) but I continue to be amazed by the sheer range and degree of influence that the company we choose to keep plays on so many different (and critical) aspects of our lives. This post by Eric Barker pulls some of those different aspects together nicely.

Eric quotes from The Longevity Project, a landmark eight-decade study that tracked the lives and loves of 1500 Amercians from childhood to death. The project exposes what really impacts our lifespan and in the process busts a few myths about subjects such as health. Contrary to popular belief, for example, giving people lists of health recommendations (stop smoking, eat well, do exercise etc) is highly unlikely to get people to change anything. People associating with other healthy people on the other hand, is "usually the strongest and most direct path of change". 

This reminded me of that study that found that obesity "can spread from person to person, much like a virus...when one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too". Which in turn reminded me of Mark writing about happiness, suicide and binge drinking in a similar vein. Eric goes on to quote a 1994 Harvard study that features in Charles Duhigg's recent book The Power Of Habit and which looked at people who had radically changed their lives. For some, this change followed a big life event such as a personal tragedy, a significant health problem or divorce. For others it was after they witnessed someone close to them going through a particularly challenging time. But interestingly there were just as many people who changed because "they were embedded in social groups that made change easier".

As Eric suggests, manipulating context, changing the environment, and changing who we spend time with may just be the most powerful way to change behaviour, whether we're conscious of it or not. All this left me thinking about the significance of who we spend (such a lot of) our time with in our working lives. Seems like this could be more significant than we ever appreciated.

Image courtesy the brilliant Exactitudes

The Squared Report 2012

"In any trade involving the generation of ideas, the pursuit of tidiness is a fruitless one. We're dealing with unpredictability. We need rampant egos as well as a furrowed concern for ROI." Jeremy Bullmore

You may recall that I was invited to be a part of the programme for Squared - the Google-led initiative in partnership with the IPA and Hyper Island designed to address the digital talent shortage in the industry. 83 newly employed graduates from a wide variety of agencies have gone through a pretty intensive three month programme to increase digital knowledge and thinking, with an ambition of 'empowering the next generation of future leaders'. For my part in Squared, I ran a session on what's the difference between a fad and a trend, which many of you kindly contributed to.

The programme has just finished (it all begins again with a new intake in a few months time) but I think alongside all the knowledge that the participants will have gained, one of the really lasting benefits will be the network of peer connections they have made and that will no doubt prove very useful to them as they progress through the industry.

When I did my session, the level of collaboration, enthusiasm and conviction from the delegates was very tangible. So it's little surprise that there is already an ouput from the Squared network. The group has come together to produce The Squared 2012 State Of The Industry Report (PDF). Billed as "a view on the key themes affecting agencies, clients and brands as defined by the young people at the cutting edge of the industry", the report has a forward penned by Jeremy Bullmore and incorporates the opinions of broad range of industry professionals from CEO's to graduates, and is focused around six pretty big questions:

• How are agencies evolving their revenue streams with the emergence of new technologies?
• What structure do you think agencies will have to adapt to in order to succeed in the future?
• Which technologies over the next 12 months will affect the business and how are we prepared for this?
• Collaboration is a buzzword in the industry at the moment. How do you see this operating in, and between agencies on a daily basis?
• How can the industry best capitalise on youth and give opportunities to young talent in the industry?
• How do you prioritise agency needs and client needs?

It's a great piece of work and well worth the read. You can view and download the report here. 

On The Facebook Mobile Phone

So speculation has once again been running rife this past week about Facebook launching a mobile phone. Not the first time it seems that they have worked on the idea, but it's perhaps different this time given the recognition of the need for specialist talent and the hiring of a bunch of ex-Apple iPhone engineers.

Dave Winer (whose views I have a lot of time for) believes that rather than a mobile phone, what Facebook could actually be focusing on is a social camera. He makes a good point about the significance of photo content to Facebook and the potential to create a product with real differentiation that has photo sharing built-in. I suspect however, that the prize Facebook could be going after is somewhat bigger. And here's why.

The smart folk at Addictive Mobile have for a while been using the metaphor of a 'vertical stack' as a way of understanding the unfolding strategy of the big four tech companies (GAFA - Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). A while back I had my own crack at what the vertical stack might look like, with an ecosystem comprised of seven key levels on which GAFA are building out a presence, and increasingly coming into direct competition with each other. The bottom layer of the vertical stack is hardware. This is where Apple have originated from, expanding into the operating systems level, through iTunes and iCloud into content and payment levels, through browsers and an app ecosystem into access, through data and closed ecosystems such as iTunes into location, identity, personalisation, and so on.

Facebook originated from this last 'context' level, developing a data-driven capability that is location aware, sharing and social graph aware, identity aware (Facebook Connect) and can power personalisation, recommendation and of-course advertising. They have moved out from this level into payment, access, and content (cloud). The hardware level, one that Amazon moved into with the Kindle and the Kindle Fire, closely followed by Google through their acquisition of Motorola and launch of the Chromebook, is a gap in their capability. It is a hole that there is good reason they might want to fill.

Steve Jobs always focused on developing a seamless ecosytem through the marriage of great hardware with brilliant software. His thinking was in large part driven by a desire to create an exceptional user experience. But there is another benefit behind this strategy - the ability to create an ecosystem unified by data, where one level informs the other levels, and where the user never has to leave.  

This, to me, is what the vertical stack is all about. Mobile is a data-rich environment and mobile hardware gives Facebook a platform for a far more comprehensive delivery of just about every other layer in the stack from location, identity and social context, through access, content and payment (through mobile money). The key difference in having this capability is that it that it can bake this into the hardware. It's not only about the ability to augment a huge app store through which they can diversify revenues, it's about making the Facebook phone the easiest possible way to make photos look great, share and access them and other content, stay-in-touch with and message your friends. It's about not having to fire up an app to do all this.

The more this kind of activity happens within a Facebook ecosystem, the better this is for Facebook. In her latest internet trends bonanza, Mary Meeker pointed out the huge potential upside still to be had in smartphones and in mobile ads. Mobile eCPMs and ARPU may currently lag that of desktop based services but with access to the rich data afforded by an ecosystem that seamlessly combines software with hardware and the kind of user engagement and time spent that Facebook has, this will surely change. Combine this with the revenue potential behind that other massive mobile-based opportunity - gaming - and you have a pretty good reason to believe that mobile hardware should form a pretty significant part of your future.

When the BBC asked Facebook for comment on the rumours, they were referred to a written statement which began: "Our mobile strategy is simple: we think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social". Only time will tell whether this cryptic sentence refers to a strategy that delivers this through making proprietary devices. But as part of a long-term future, you might well say that there is very little reason why it shouldn't.