Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Yesterday morning I was reading a short New York Magazine article about the downfall of one of the last truly alternative performance venues on New York's Lower East Side: Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction. Like so many that came before it - Fez Under Time Cafe, Surf Reality, Collective Unconscious, Sin-é, and Tonic - Mo Pitkin's is now destined to become just another glittering memory in the unfortunately sieve-like minds of its often alcoholic and sometimes drug-addled patrons. (As an occasional patron of these venues myself, I mean no offense.)

As I remembered these venues, and thought about how they've come and gone (some faster than others), it occurred to me that social networking sites, like Friendster, MySpace, and now Facebook, really aren't all that different. As I wrote in a previous post, "What we're all looking for [in a social networking site] is a completely low-maintenance, casual, and low-key little spot where we can just chill out." We want a space where we can easily and intuitively navigate our complex social lives with little stress and little effort. Think about the real-world spaces where you've gathered with your close friends over the course of your life. Junior High? High School? College? Post-College? Career? Of course the actual locations have changed; but I bet that the atmospheres and the fundamental experiential qualities of each environment have changed, too.

And it's completely understandable that your chosen hang-outs have changed, because you've changed. You've evolved, from Junior High to High School to College to Post-College to Career, maybe family, and beyond. As these changes go through your life you seek out new experiences and new communities who share your values and interests. And the way that you interact with these communities has to adjust to the exigencies of each community's unique social dynamic.

Now look at these social networking sites. All of the popular websites have come of age during a short amount of time. Their popularity has been fueled by a relatively small, but passionate, portion of the entire online population. Each site was the right thing, at the right time. MySpace is still on top with the lion's share of social networking users. But, what happens when it's youthful and unsettled core users grow up? Start getting married? Start having kids? Yes, of course you could point out a significant number of active MySpace users who are already married with kids, but frankly they are a small minority of the entire active user base.

Look at Facebook. I would say that their move to open their network to users out of college last fall was a wise response to the natural change in the lives of their core user base. The die-hard Facebook patrons had grown up with Facebook during their undergrad years, but now they are out in the real-world, away from college and they needed their online identity to adapt.

The question now is, will Facebook be able to continue to stretch to accommodate an increasingly wide range of users in vastly different stages of their lives?

One of the frustrations that Danah Boyd voiced in this post about Facebook was the loss of context. She wanted one kind of interaction with her close friends from college, and a very different, and less intimate, interaction with people she only knew through her blog.

If Facebook - or any other social networking site - hopes to grow and continue to be relevant and useful to the users who first made the site successful, it will have to be dynamic enough to allow its users to fine-tune their interactions and online relationships. Allow users to share certain information with their co-workers, another set of information with close friends, and another set of information with strictly online acquaintances.

One of the problems that this presents, though, is that it is much easier to finesse these layers of intimacy in real life than it is online. In this post Noah Brier wrote, "As anyone on Facebook can attest to, making friendship a binary decision makes things quite difficult on occasion." I responded that we want "to just quietly shift your attention from one person to another without broadcasting it." Controlling intimacy is a delicate interaction that does not lend itself to the binary constructs of social networking sites. The key to success for Facebook, or any other social networking site, is figuring out an elegant solution to this problem.

Since the invention of the internet, humankind has been destined for a world in which the ability to access information is ubiquitous and instantaneous. And when any individual can become aware of any idea or piece of knowledge at any time in any place, then a functional collective conscious will be realized. When I say functional collective conscious, I mean that in addition to simply being cognizant of the same memes, each of us will have the ability to actively call up information that is stored not in our own brains but in this networked collective conscious, and that our ability to access this remote information will be so quick and effortless as to be effectively the same as possessing the knowledge in our own brains.

3 contemporary technology developments will each play an important role in taking us one step closer to this future reality: the FCC's upcoming 700 MHz Band auction, Custom Vertical Search, and the Semantic Web.

On January 16, 2008 the FCC will auction off the last portion of the wireless spectrum capable of enabling a nationwide hi-speed digital communications network. In addition to the major telecoms, Google has made itself known as a likely bidder. And yesterday, Business Week reported that Apple might get in on the action, too. Although it may sound overly optimistic, within the next couple years, we might very well see Google offering everyone in the US unlimited access to a voice and data communications network supported only by advertising. No more phone and internet bills to Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, TimeWarner, and whoever else. The new network will be fast and wireless, and it will be everywhere. And this is a very real step towards completely ubiquitous access to digital information.

As Read/WriteWeb discussed in this post about Google's new custom search engine, if executed effectively, Vertical Search can be a powerful tool and add significant value to users' experience. Technorati is a classic example of a vertical search engine, but they could be much more fine-tuned than that. Imagine you're an online retailer who sells classic rock records on vinyl. Wouldn't it be nice for your potential customers if they could search the web for only the highest quality reviews of the classic albums you're selling? You could curate the sources for the reviews, and the visitor can search for the reviews they want to read. Another excellent potential use for custom vertical search would be personally relevant searches. Wouldn't it be nice to have a filter on Google to just search everything your online friends may have said about a particular subject? When I heard that Google was beginning to allow any user to create their own custom vertical search, I began to imagine what might happen if users also started tagging different custom searches with their own labels? And then Google leveraged that layer of categorization to enhance their regular search? Google could become much smarter very quickly if it not only tracked users' perceptions of Google's search results - as it does now by following links and clicks - but also tracked users' perceptions of each other's searches.

Wikipedia says: "The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily." In effect, what this means is that elements of web content, like this blog entry, are labeled in ways that are useful to computers, i.e. the computer is able to recognize the difference between the title, the body of the entry, the date of the entry, the author, the comments, etc. While this development may seem like the most basic of the three I've mentioned here, it's arguably the most important, because it is key in enabling the internet to better understand our queries of it.

Now imagine a world in which any time you are about to make any decision, you are able to instantly access all the information that you would find most relevant to your choice. When you're deciding what to cook for dinner, what movie to go see, where to get your car's oil changed, how to bet at blackjack, how to spell hors d'oeuvres. The results will be uniquely curated for each of us based on our social networks and personally tailored search filters. The results will only include the content we're seeking, not simply a url address. And consequently, it won't feel like it does now - get on the internet, Google it, sift through the results, read the web page, find your answer; it will be more like thinking to yourself, "What was the name of the street I grew up on? Delaware Ave."

Now, where does advertising fit into this new world?

Most of the people that our clients aspire to gain as customers have two major obstacles that prevent them from becoming every brand's idealized customer, the mythical slave of desire with a bottomless bank account. 1) They have too many choices. 2) They have too much stuff. And any attempt at simply convincing a community that your stuff is a better choice than your competitor's stuff is an uphill battle with limited potential return. If you hope to be the next breakout success in the new media-enabled marketing environment your repertoire better include more than pretty pictures, catchy slogans, and strategic media buys.

We know that the goal on the new playing field is engagement. I think that David Armano described this desired effect of new media marketing campaigns perfectly in his post about The Marketing Spiral. And I would only add that the measure of engagement and advocacy is best described as resonance, or the tendency of an individual to be compelled through interaction to share their experience with their community. But, how is this effect achieved?

The three essential elements of a product or service that will resonate within a community in a meaningful and compelling way are Relevance, Utility, and Delight.

Relevance
Each customer's choices are guided by myriad personal values and lifestyle circumstances. Our relationships, our aspirations, and our passions. Each individual's identity is unique and intricately nuanced. The traits that are shared by certain individuals extend beyond traditional boundaries, i.e. age, income, or geographic proximity. This complex list of interests and responsibilities shapes our self-identity, and the places where we overlap with each other defines the communities with which we identify. When we make purchasing decisions we use this perception of self-identity and community to intuitively rate how much importance or meaning to subscribe to any given experience.

Utility
Make yourself useful by offering customers something they need. Johnny Vulcan, of Anomaly, describes it as "being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch." We are beginning to see a steady shift away from consumerism; "less is better" is the newly regnant mantra among trend-setters and influencers. More people are beginning to realize that the endgame of unabated material consumption is bleak and unsustainable. So a completely frivolous purchase embarrasses the customer and inhibits their willingness to become an advocate of the experience. On the other hand, when customers say to themselves, "I needed that," you create advocates.

Delight
Give your customers the pleasure of discovery. Different than outright happiness or fun, delight is a unique strain of satisfaction. Delight is the feeling we get when an idea or experience surprises us by rousing a sudden effervescence of joy out of our otherwise staid disposition. We rely on delight as a physiological validation of the wisdom of our choices. Delight also induces a feeling of ownership, because when those chemicals get released we established an emotional bond with the experience. Delight is the intangible and unquantifiable element, the pixie dust.

These are the items on every customer's conscious and subconscious check list.

1) There's significant overlap between the product and my personal values and lifestyle circumstances.
2) The product enhances my life in a substantially meaningful way.
3) The experience inspired an emotional connection through the pleasure of discovery.

The customer's experience of the brand's product or service has to satisfy all three if it hopes to inspire resonance; and the successful effect of this experience elicits a transformation from awareness to engagement to advocacy.