comments on the social graph

ANTICIPATING WHAT AVERAGE OPINION EXPECTS AVERAGE OPINION TO BE

Wed, 07/28/2010 - 07:34

At the IAB Rising Voices session last week I spoke on user-generated content and crowdsourcing and did a little experiment to demonstrate the wisdom of the crowds.

The beauty queens in the image above, were the winners of Miss Beach World. What I didn't share during the experiment is whether red, blue, or green won, came 2nd or came 3rd. I asked the Rising Voices (around 40 people last week) to guess the order the judges selected for position 1, 2, or 3.

This is a very different task to asking who they thought was prettiest, second prettiest, or third prettiest. The distinction is important. My aim was to see whether they could anticipate what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.The judges were defined as an 'average opinion' since they could not know who they were. They were asked to think who on average would win this type of contest?

In the table below you will see the options they could choose from.


Thankfully for me - the single largest block of guesses - around 40% of the crowd, chose the right answer (see comments for right answer). They correctly second guessed the way the judges chose.

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This is an example of the application of collective intelligence, swarm logic, wisdom of the crowds - or whatever else you'd like to call it. More specifically, its what the celebrated economist J.M Keynes called the Beauty Contest. Instead of the usual sort of beauty contest, where women parade in front of a panel of judges, Keynes’ version is a post-modern contest involving the full participation of the public as real competitors.

Keynes' beauty contest happens through a fictional newspaper in which entrants are asked to choose a set of six faces from photographs of women that are the "most beautiful". Those who picked the most popular face are then eligible for a prize. Indeed, if all the other competitors are also aiming to win the prize, they are also looking at the problem from the same point of view.

Keynes likened the competitors in this beauty contest to professional speculators in financial markets. Keynes argued these speculators do not really attempt to predict what an investment will yield, but instead try to stay one or two steps ahead of average opinion:- they attempt to beat the market.

This type of intelligence - the hive mind - can be harnessed for crowdsouring, predictive markets, and creating social enterprises. Businesses will need to think of smart ways of truly capitalise on the latent intelligence that is buried deep underground in their firms. Mining this intelligence from your employees, stakeholders, and target market will be a key competitive advantage going forward. This is real social media.
Posted by Tony Effik

FACEBOOK HITS 500M USERS

Wed, 07/21/2010 - 23:04

Facebook hits 500m users, and is racing towards 1bn users. Strange things will start to happen. A virtuous cycle is revolving around it. More users means more time spent, and more time spent on Facebook means more advertising inventory it can sell. Which in turn means more revenue. More revenue means more investment in r&d, which means it can hire more of the best people. And more of the best people means it creates a better product which attracts more users.

But above all of these is the fact that Facebook is building a more and more accurate database of our social likes and dislikes. This data coupled with smart algorithms for linking people to products will be worth very, very serious money.Posted by Tony Effik

SOCIAL MEDIA GROWS UP BY GOING ALGORITHMIC

Sun, 07/11/2010 - 23:03

A recent piece from NMA: Social media is a catch-all term for a range of disciplines unceremoniously clumped together. I divide this world into two distinct types of activity: manual and algorithmic, writes Tony Effik.

Most of today’s social media is of the manual variety. All that activity on Twitter, those blogs, all those Facebook pages and updates, and all those sites that are open to comments and even votes are generally all manual, and usually co-ordinated by a community manager.

Social media in its current form is now over six years old but still lacks a killer business model. The goldrush currently around community management is interesting, as all brands will need some form of community management, which means there’s still more growth to come. Community management will be a key part of the killer business model, but it’s not the full answer.

During Web 1.0 it took nine years – from Netscape’s IPO in August 1995 to Google’s in August 2004 – before the claims made in dotcom era investment prospectuses where made true. Google’s innovation was moving search from a human-based indexing model to an algorithmic one, and combining it with a killer business model in AdWords.

There are a few great candidates in social media chasing the algorithmic model Twitter is now a real-time search engine. Rumour has it that Twitter is working on algorithms that not only rate tweets with a ‘resonance’ score, but also rates the pages they link to to create a PageRank-like algorithm.

Facebook’s recent launch of Open Graph is another great candidate. Through the ‘like’ buttons now appearing around the web, Facebook is creating algorithms that help users and brands with all sorts of matchmaking.

Demand Media is the smartest firm that no one has heard of. It produces 4,000 videos and articles every day based on an algorithm that identifies gaps between what people are searching for and the content already out there. All its sites have social features, but the really smart thing is that all its content is crowdsourced from a community of freelancers that it manages with a smart algorithmic process.

The different threads that make up social media are now separating. So in the same way that every firm needs to manage communities using manual models, they should also be thinking about how they might work with these new algorithms.

Posted by Tony Effik

MONITORING AND ANALYSING ONLINE CONVERSATION

Sun, 06/27/2010 - 20:18

This is Gatorade Mission Control, where they analyse online buzz around the brand. It's pretty impressive. And a big investment, and commitment.

According to Mashable, "The room features six big monitors with five seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards –- also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom built with partners including Radian6 and IBM" Read more about it on mashable.

This area is now gaining rapid traction as a discipline. Just last week McKinsey, and Nielsen joined forces to create a new company called NM Incite. The new firm will take on from where Nielsen BuzzMetrics left off, and use buzz monitoring to help transform business operations including product development, marketing, communications and customer service. With the creation of this new venture, BuzzMetrics becomes wholly part of NM Incite.
It's getting very interesting.
Posted by Tony Effik

THE FIGHT IS OVER: NEW EGG CAMPAIGN

Fri, 06/25/2010 - 17:43

Publicis Modem and Egg launch The Fight Is Over

See more Egg videos on YouTube

Egg on TwitterPosted by Tony Effik

MINING THE SOCIAL GRAPH

Sat, 06/05/2010 - 09:53

Social CRM has become the next buzzword you'll have to master.

You'll need to know:

1. A bit about Facebook and Twitter; and
2. A little about CRM strategy
3. A lot about data analytics
   

The problem with the current hype around social CRM is that there are lots of people evangelising their skills who know about point 1 (Facebook and Twitter) but know little about CRM, and data, and the 40 year old science that sits around it.

We - in digital - are fond of re-learning the lessons of advertising over and over again. Our contempt for traditional advertising obfuscates our opportunity to learn. Social CRM is still in its infancy, and is better described as social direct marketing. Lester Wunderman - generally considered the father of direct marketing- introduced a "direct marketing" approach to service his clients, using the medium of clients’ mailboxes as a way to develop a more personal connection with potential customers than general advertising had previously found possible. Exchange the word mailbox for Facebook account, and add the fact that your friends can see and act on these messages in your mailbox, and we are talking social CRM.

Twitter is generous with data, but Facebook is a closed shop. Once the data that is trapped inside the Facebook API is released, social media strategists will need to take a crash course in data strategy. Segmentation and targeting will become more important. Remember recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM Analysis)? Lifetime value modelling. Use of regression and Chi-square. Add to these techniques the maths that surround graph theory and you can see why I've been calling for a new class of professional to tackle this complexity. The Digital Economist will be key to deciphering the changing landscape of advertising. The list of data and CRM techniques is endless, but if social CRM is to pay for itself, social strategists will need to master these techniques and invent a few of their own.Posted by Tony Effik

TWITWEE THE TWITTER CUCKOO CLOCK

Fri, 05/21/2010 - 12:32

This is both clever, and pointless at the same time. Clever like other experimental Internet of Things ideas, like Baker Tweet, and Botanicals, because it gives us a glimpse into what the Internet of Things might eventually look like. Conversely, its as pointless as Baker Tweet, and Botanicals because its interesting for 5min and 5min only. The guy who made this - Haroon Baig - is a rising talent. Check out his other work here Haroon Baig.

Twitwee Clock from Haroon Baig on Vimeo.

Posted by Tony Effik

MOTIVATING IDEAS AT THE HEART OF GREAT FIRMS

Thu, 05/20/2010 - 10:42

Now social media is on everyone's agenda, how do we answer some of the big organizational questions? A lot of the social media work I do now is about helping firms organize for social media, particularly on a global basis. Cross-departmental organization is also a major challenge. I recently did a talk on who owns social media at Reputations Online.

How do you structure firms for the social age? Who does what? How do you motivate people?

This video shows that money is a bad motivator. We have other higher purpose motivations. These motivations are at the heart of successful firms like Apple, and Skype, and also sit at the heart of the success of open source initiatives like Apache, Linux, and Wikipedia. Although the talk is not about social media there are lots of interesting ideas that can be applied to social media. The video is based on a talk by Daniel Pink, an author on the future of work.

Posted by Tony Effik

BARATUNDE THURSTON ON TWITTER HASHTAGS

Mon, 05/17/2010 - 09:54

If you don't understand or use hastags on Twitter, this is a very witty introduction from Baratunde Thurston from The Onion.

Posted by Tony Effik