Malcolm Gladwell can be quoted saying, “When you take the unconscious seriously you undermine virtually all quantitative market research and its focus.” In a similar sense it is in place to question quantitative website analytics when it comes to understanding or proving the success of social, brand or other emotional activities online.
Borrowing some terminology from Jenkins we could say that the accumulation of visitors’ actions, measured by the web analytics tool, represent the value of an activity.
- Value gives an appropriate indication of whether or not the mechanics of the solution has attracted and kept the attention of enough visitors for a satisfying amount of time, or persuaded them to travel along a predefined path. - Value is a reference to the success of an activity before we know if it has created any effect.
- Value is a quantitative.
On the other hand, the emotional effect of the interaction represents the quality of it. Borrowing from Jenkins again this could be defined as the worth of the activity.
- Worth confirms whether or not the visitor has adopted the idea, and to which effect the idea has been transformed, or as Jenkins defines it; multiplied.
- Worth is the effect of the activity after participants have been exposed to the message, absorbed it, multiplied it, made it their own and are ready to share it in order to confirm or disconfirm it in their own networks.
- Worth represents the transformation of a companies idea into a persons self. The idea has become something meaningful. This meaningfulness is the goal of the activity.
Today we measure mechanics and quantity inside the experience, as it is happening, and leave the qualitative measurements to some time after. I reckon this is not because we think ideas need time to “sink in”, but because our tools for measuring quality are expensive and limited to just a few performed pre- or post activity. In any case we most often want the totality of our activities to be finished before we try to find if it has been successful or not.
This is where the change is needed. In recordable media there is no need to wait for ideas to “sink in”. Ideas are best preserved if recorded before the weakness of the brains memory system manipulates the feedback the visitor is able to give.
What we need is to start tailoring solutions for immediate qualitative feedback, designing them to record adoption and transformation as it is happening. And to understand the worth of the communication, the meaningful stuff, before and without it being manipulated by visitors’ post-rationalization.
The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.
It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.
This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.
Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.
Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.
Find the Slideshow below, or here. (If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).
I’ve picked out Itay Talgam’s presentation on Conducting Creativity as my favorite, not necessarily because it contains a lot of relevant technical stuff or hands out project experiences. It doesn’t, Itay’s focuses on putting great conductors into context under the goal of teaching his listeners about creative collaboration.
This ads to the content on this blog, because.. carrying on the theme from some of the previous posts; in order to see solutions we need to understand humans, and the interaction between them.
This would have to go without saying when we’re trying to figure out the drivers and incentives for collaboration, community and participation. And is essential in order to understand what this would mean to your company and the amount of control one protects or releases to the public.
The talk creates a beautiful and valuable perspective, touching on a range of different features related to collaboration and creativity. And… it was the only presentation I can remember that got an almost never ending standing ovation!
Here is a selection of three quotes by Itam, or him quoting others, all found in the presentation:
“It’s not only about personal style, this is a part of it, and I think an interesting part. but it’s about creating a certain set of culture that enables certain modes of collaboration between people”
“Without order nothing can exist, without chaos nothing can grow”
“The worst damage I can do to my organization is to give them a very clear indication. Why? Because that creates a one on one relations between me and the players. Which makes the ignore the ensemble and work directly with me”
As participants worlds fragment across a range of platforms, arenas, channels and screens, companies are met with an opportunity to build behind bigger ideas.
This means both the opportunity to move the marketing from messaging, to content to context. But also to explore the Brand Situation. Where the brand fits into the lives of their participants, and facilitates the situation relevant to the product, in order to create value and become invaluable.
This slideshow is a follow-up to my last one, Three Major Changes In Digital Marketing, and it tries to put these three changes into a bigger, relevant context.
I’ve added some voice-over to this one as well, even though it’s not earth shatteringly brilliant :o) It hopefully ads more value to the experience.
A presentation on statistics from Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. Eric moves from statistics and storytelling to search and exploration. Much recommended, via the Stamen Blog.
I am not to sure about this graph. Defining tech adoption in correlation with the national GDP.. Does that really give me a good actionable understanding of the level and need of my target group?
Norway ranges in the light greys (which is very conservative), while several other world- and European studies has put us in the “advanced top five” when it comes to advanced adoption of Internet and information technology.
Judge for yourselves – over at Experentia (again, their blog is just to good :o)
A common “mistake” when using statistics is to reference the parts of the site which reflects the effectfulness of the mechanics, not the marketing or brand goals.
As an example: Four minutes spent on the site gives you four minutes interacting with the brand, but it says nothing about how successful the brand has been in using those four minutes to communicate the correct story or meaning to the participant.
The problem is that if the effectfullness of the mechanics are going to become the main goal and the main success criteria of an online campaign, then the story and the meaning of the brand takes second row to the mechanical aspects of the solution, and we are back again at square one.
So we might not be turning into idiots, but statistics as it’s been used today most certainly takes the spotlight away from the idea and the brand communication and turns it on to stickiness, low thresholds and playability etc.
Take a look at this lecture by Robin Hunicke from the Lift Conference, where the topic is games and the mechanics of games. Every game can be put into a formula M+D=A. (Mechanics+Dynamics=Aesthetics). Where the solutions itself presents the mechanics, but the participation and interactions from and between participants create the dynamics. It the sum of these two parts that create the aesthetics or the essence of a game, and the reason it becomes a success or not. The same can be said for marketing activities.
- And in this environment we need to get better and more focused on measuring the aesthetics, not only the mechanics.
