Paul Adams: The Foundation of (Online) Motivation

Facebook's Global Experience Manager (what a title!) Paul Adams was interviewed recently by O'Reilly Radar on the foundation of online motivation: what motivates people to interact or "like" a brand and what brands motivations should be when creating online experiences. The full article is well worth a read, but if you're stuck for time I've taken two quotes from this great summary by Waggen Eredstrom that somewhat sums up what Mr Adams talks about:

"It’s problematic that many businesses focus on existing and emerging technology, and not on social behavior. Thinking about platform integration first, like Twitter or Facebook, or technologies first, like what could be enabled by ‘mobile location’ or ‘real-time updates,’ is the wrong place to start. Often, businesses need to step back and consider what will motivate people to use what they are developing, above and beyond what exists today. Something that I’ve been saying for a while is that human behavior changes slowly, much slower than technology. By focusing on human behavior, not only are you much more likely to create something that people value and use, but you’re more likely to protect yourself from sudden changes in technology."

"We’re still seeing the fans and followers arms race — businesses trying to gather as many fans as possible. But I think that’s fundamentally wrong. It’s more important to focus on quality, not quantity, of connections.

For example, many brands run competitions on social media platforms. You have to ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ that business to enter. So the question is whether they are making connections with advocates of their brand, or with people who simply love competitions. If it’s the latter, then they’re filling their social media interactions and data with noise.

As I mentioned earlier, people are often most influenced by their closest friends. So only make connections with true advocates of your brand, and market to the friends of those fans."

Thanks to Jane and Ed for the link.

The Internet And Emotions

It's an absolute fact that social media and the Internet have  fundamentally changed every part of our society. We're closer to each  other now than we've ever been. No longer locked down by the  geographical constraints of old, groups and societies are forming  globally and people are connecting in a way the world has never seen  before.

As an ad creative I spend most of my time thinking about digital and social media in terms of brands: How we can use it to shift product? How we can increase loyalty and bring a consumer closer to the brand? But every now and again I step back and look at what digital media artists are doing to explore the deeper side of social media: the emotional, human side.

Below are two great, inspiring projects by some very talented artists that explore the Internet and emotions.

The first project is by Jonathon Harris entitled We Feel Fine. The site has been up for about 2 years now, but if you haven't explored in a while or ever, it's well worth spending some time with. We Feel Fine takes tweets, posts, updates from social media channels and groups them by emotion. What's particularly interesting about this project is how it taps into the guilty human pleasure of voyeurism. Peeking into someone's life on an emotional level such as this, or on a surface level such as looking through someone's facebook photo's is, as much as we mightn't like to admit it, one of the attractions of social media.  As the artist himself puts it:

"It  is about creating an ever-changing portrait of the emotional landscape  of the human world.  It is about creating a two-way mirror — where  viewers simultaneously experience a God-like voyeurism (spying on the  feelings of others) and a bashful vulnerability (realizing their own  words and pictures are in there, too).  When these two feelings mix  together (voyeurism and vulnerability), the hope is that they produce a  kind of humbling empathy — demonstrating that individual experiences are  actually universal."

The second project by two artists Theo Watson and Kyle McDonaldand captures positive human emotions to the Internet. Happy Things is an opensource program that uses the webcam on your computer to analyze your face when you're browsing  and posts your screenshot every time it detects you smiling, along with  the web page that you found amusing.

This project is more about measuring the personal emotion of happiness rather than the collective emotions of We feel Fine. What it gives you is something akin to personal online happiness analytics: a way of understanding what it is about the Internet that makes you happy.

Both projects show that the new Social Internet can be used for more than advertising and can contribute to human society on a deeper, human level. Very inspiring stuff.

Info and Imagery via: PSFK and Welcome To Optimism

Quora: A New Player in the World of Social Media?

Quora has been receiving a lot of online and offline media coverage recently. So this weekend I sat down to explore the product, read some articles and find out what the hype is all about.


What is Quora?

Quora is a question and answer service, similar in ways to yahoo answers: you post a question and it is answered by real people through a login or facebook connect.

Okay, this sounds like yahoo answers with an open graph feature, how is it different? I googled my question and found this thread on Quora: How is Quora different to X? A bit of a worrying start in my opinion. Surely the conversation around a new product such as this should revolve around how it can be used, not what it is?

As I continued to read I discovered this article by Saneel Radia over on BBH Labs. Where as I am still on the fence regarding Quora, he most definitely is not:

"To clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Quora. It’s that I hate it and want it wiped off the face of the earth."

He makes a very valid point regarding the "How is Quora different to X?" conversation I mentioned earlier:

"OK, so maybe #Twitter was a trending topic on Twitter the first 6 months. But those conversations were focused primarily on usage and innovation with the platform. The Quora self-referential conversations are literally people scratching their heads looking for value. There’s no better sign that the emperor has no clothes people."

His article has sparked quite a heated debate in the comments section. 

On the other side of the fence The Telegraph claims that Quora will be bigger than Twitter and is full of praise for the product:

"Twitter was fun for the few, but Quora will be useful to the many. It's is the place to go for on-demand answers to specific questions from people who know what they're talking about. That's something no search engine - or existing social network - comes close to. Monetisation strategies present themselves readily, where they did not - and still do not - in the microblogging platform's case."

Quora is still in it's infancy and it will be interesting see when all the hype dies down whether it will stick, or suffer a similar fate to Google Wave. For now I'm going to sit back, watch and reserve a definite personal opinion until later (it's a very comfortable fence).

The Social Media Sobriety Test

The Social Media Sobriety Test for Webroot  by TDA Boulder, is a nifty little application for your desktop that makes you pass a side-of-the-road sobriety test before allowing you to post updates to Facebook, Twitter or any other social media websites. The site claims that "Nothing good happens online after 1am", I'd beg to differ, but they're probably correct. I know I could have used this once or twice.

Old Spice Man on Social Media

This is a very clever, and funny social media campaign for the already very funny and clever Old Spice ads by W+K. Mr. Old Spice is responding directly to his Twitter, youtube and Facebook comments. I wonder how long he'll (they'll) be able to keep it up.

Tweet him quick before he dies from exhaustion!