Nov. 5 - Gillin, Ch. 10 - Social Media Content

Chapter 10 of Secrets of Social Media Marketing explains the fundamental importance of content when building social media or using it in a business campaign.  Naturally, one of the first things a social media author must do is to make sure that his or her content is presented in an interesting way that won't bore the person viewing it.  There are plenty of ways to get creative with social media content - the important thing is that you get creative.  After all, as Gillin points out, even bland content can be made original if approached in an original way.  Aside from making content interesting to the user, another primary decision should be if an online social network is the right medium for a given business objective.  Gillin provides an extensive list of various objectives for using social media, but the fastest way to narrow it down is to decide what the objectives are for each buyer and each stage of the process.  In order to keep an online business campaign manageable, Gillin explains, it must be modularized.

To Gillin and other social media authors, the "single greatest distributive effect of the new internet" is the new ability for anyone to be both the author and publisher of their own content, and in order to succeed in social media you have to think of yourself as such.  In fact, the medium I'm using right now to write this post demonstrates that very fact - this blog entry is my own intellectual property, and I'll be publishing it under my own name.  In order to effectively use this ability as a part of a business strategy, social media authors must also think like publishers.

October 29 - Significance, Influence

October 29 - Significance, Influence

Chapter 7 of Design to Thrive explains the dynamics of building significance among the members of an online community.  One of the difficult aspects of creating a sense of significance is a sort of paradox between letting people into a group on an arbitrary basis in order to build a member base and the resulting lack of value they might feel in having become members so easily.  Essentially, letting people easily become members of a group makes them value their membership less, and so social media authors must learn how to juggle exclusivity and inclusion when building social media.  This factor of building membership based on exclusivity is also known as social capital.  It basically builds the significance of a group because when building a community, quality should be valued over quantity.  This is how Facebook started out, and when they went public a lot of its members were actually upset over the loosened criteria for joining.  I've personally felt the same way in my martial arts career as I've seen more and more karate schools offer advancement based on less and less stringent guidelines over the years.  My black belt was a very difficult achievement and took a long time to reach, so nowadays when I see small children who have only been in martial arts for a few years walking around with black belts of their own , I tend to get frustrated.  Not only do I feel that they deserve theirs less, but the value of my black belt goes down.  To say the least, in regards to significance in both martial arts and social media authoring, it all boils down to quality over quantity.

Mashable's business section contains an informative infographic on the criteria of Influence, which begins with a history of Influence that began in 1704 with the first recorded advertisement.  Obviously, social media is much different today than it was 300 years ago, but some of the fundamental dynamics remain the same.  The graphic explains the split between two main schools of thought on Influence. The first is called "the law of the few," and was first posited by a guy named Malcolm  Gladwell.  This law states that influence is driven by small groups of people with massive followings.  The other side of the argument was first presented by Duncan Watts, and is known as "the pass-around power of everyday people."  Watts's argument seems to hold more weight, and the facts support it.  It's simple, really - consumers trust their peers more than any other form of advertising, and that's something social media authors must keep in mind when building Influence in any online community.

October 8 - Made to Stick - Ch. 3 & 4

Chapter 1 of Made to Stick discusses the necessity of simplicity in getting ideas to stick.  A story itself doesn't need to be simple in order to stick; rather, Heath & Heath explain that simplicity is part of what makes up an effective schema, which in turn helps us to grasp concepts faster and more easily.  A great example we've dealt with in our class recently has been in writing executive summaries for our formal recommendation reports.  Rather than bogging the reader down with a complex slew of information that would otherwise detract from his or her comprehension, the executive summary quickly details the main points of the entire report; it's basically the brass tax or the gist of whoever the report was made for needs to know.  Heath & Heath call these facts the core ideas.  For a concept to be easily understood it must be simple, and it must access the core ideas of whatever is being expressed.  Going along the same military analogy the writers use in the beginning of the chapter, military commanders everywhere discuss battle plans on two levels, strategy and tactics, and Heath & Heath explain that an idea which sticks should be expressed on a strategic level rather than a tactical one.  In hostile situations as well as those outside of battlefield, a given strategy is the large-scale plan for what a commander wants to happen.  For instance, a commander's strategy could be to capture a given bunker - that's all there is to it.  Where tactics come in, however, is the nitty-gritty details of how that strategy must be carried out.  A sticky idea is one that is strategic, and does not waste time with tactical information.

Chapter 2 discusses two important questions that must be asked in getting ideas to stick: How do I get people's attention, and how do I keep it?  One answer that Heath & Heath offer for addressing both of those questions is making those ideas unexpected.  As they rightly point out, "The first problem with communication is getting people's attention" (64).  So what's one of the best ways to do that?  Well, catching them off guard is one great way.  One of my favorite high school teachers got our attention on the first day of class.  None of us had ever seen or heard of her before, and when she walked into the classroom, she immediately seemed like she was in a horrible mood.  The first thing she did was give us a pop quiz, and got more and more noticeably upset as the class went on.  She made such a show of her supposedly evil demeanor that it was all we talked about for the rest of the day.  The next day, we showed up to class and she was an entirely different person.  She was all smiles, friendly as could be, and had even tossed out our pop quizzes from the previous day.  It was all a rouse to just to catch us off guard, and to be sure, she has always stuck in my mind, even to this day.

October 1 - Design to Thrive - Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of Design to Thrive explains the process of creating a sense of belonging among members of communities, and I love that Howard chose to use the much-loved ritual of fraternity hazing as an example of initiating individuals into a community.  Initiation rituals, Howard explains, basically serve as ways to help novices become part of a community, and "level up" the ranks as they become more experienced and knowledgeable.  This idea of leveling applies directly to social media in the sense that users who become involved in a community will want to build their own sense of belonging through a sort of quantifiable experience level - think leveling up in online games like Warcraft; however, Howard points out that there are drawbacks to creating belonging in this way.  For instance, once a Warcraft player reaches the highest rank possible, his or her interest will likely fade.  And perhaps a more relevant example of this drawback would be social media sites like Facebook or Myspace.  For better or worse, a great deal of people seem to build their sense of status among online communities through their number of friends or connections, and I feel that this actually detracts from their sense of belonging as they become fixated on simply raising those numbers rather than interacting with the people they represent.

Stories or myths can be effective ways to create belonging among communities.  The first example that comes to my mind is the legend of the alligators in the sewers of New York City.  Although it's highly unlikely, the story has survived for so long mostly because of the unique sense of community every New Yorker seems to feel, and the togetherness they get from speculating together over the truth of the myth.  Symbols or visual identities are two more great ways to build belonging, and while Howard provides the example of Clemson's logo and the ubiquitous C-L-E-M-S-O-N chant, perhaps an even more basic one would be the instantly-identifiable Clemson orange, and how the color has become invariably associated with the Clemson community.  And how has the color orange become so tied to Clemson and the members of its community?  Howard has set out eight rules that explain this process, and they apply to any sort of social atmosphere.  First, create and distribute a story of origin.  Then, create an initiation ritual (think frat brothers hazing frat brothers).  Next, create a mythology and circulate it.  Create leveling up ceremonies, then establish routines and protocols, and then establish symbols, colors, and visual identities.  And finally, for online social media, create a membership application as an initiation ritual.  Through this process, any group of people- not just online social media - can create belonging among its members, and that is one of the first steps in creating a lasting and thriving community.

Sept. 17 - Design to Thrive - Chapter 8

Howard's final chapter discusses further applications of the RIBS criteria, as well as the broad implications of new social media in today's digital landscape.  The first section uses a few of the protests via Twitter over the 2009 Iranian national election happening as an example of how RIBS can be used not only to build social media, but also to analyze them.  Through this sort of analysis one can determine what elements are missing, and then what steps need to be taken in order to implement them.  Twitter has become one of the most widely used social media tools today largely due to the fact that its relatively simple involves the RIBS criteria in a very straightforward way.  For instance, Howard explains that Twitter's hashtag and retweet (RT) functions are directly aligned with what we call "protocols of belonging," and the socially charged political moment of the 2009 Iranian election made those who protested via Twitter feel a strong sense of significance.

On a more large-scale level, however, the profound impact social media has on our world every day can be, in Howard's words, a double-edged sword.  Once social media begins to affect larger institutions, issues of control over the information being shared begin to emerge.  And this, people, already is and will continue to be one of the primary issues regarding information technology as we delve further into the twenty-first century.  Intellectual property rights, open-source information, creative control - no matter what angle you approach it from, addressing such a topic is a slippery slope in today's digital environment, and I feel that a single chapter just scratches the tip of the iceberg on the subject.  However, Howard rightly steps back and looks at the grand scheme of things - on the "strategic" level - to get us started in thinking about how information today should be shared.  The first copyright laws were implemented for much the same reason they are today - for protecting not only the legitimacy but also the integrity of information.  As information, still in the form of books, steadily became more available and affordable, issues of control over information become more and more relevant, and possession of information began to shift from the institutional to the authorial - I was reminded by Howard's mention of Gutenberg's printing press of Project Gutenberg; this massive, ongoing effort to digitize existing print media for electronic access is compounding the work of their namesake as they continue to do essentially the same thing Johannes Gutenberg did hundreds of years ago.  Today, with the waning of print culture and the emergence of the "Eye Generation," the rights of authors, artists, and information in general are changing forever.  And with social media as one of our primary forms of communication, Howard would agree that, with our RIBS criteria in mind, our best bet is to focus not on the tactical, but on the strategic impacts of information sharing in the digital age.

Sept. 10 - Made to Stick - Ch. 6 - Stories

Sept. 10 - Made to Stick - Ch. 6 - Stories

This chapter details the various aspects of effective stories.  First, for a story to be effective, it must contain some sort of wisdom.  Heath and Heath use children's bedtime stories as a good example - and Samuel L. Jackson would agree - kids tend to request bedtime stories simply for entertainment rather than some sort of moral lesson or enlightened insight.  For the older crowd, however, Heath and Heath tell us that "stories are effective teaching tools" (205-206).  What does it take for a story to be an effective tool for teaching, then?  It must provide simulation - "illustrat[ing] causal relationships that people hadn't recognized before" - along with inspiration, as was the case of the underdog nurse who offered the right diagnosis rather than the chief neonatologist.  A story that provides both simulation and inspiration, Heath and Heath write, is "geared to generating action" (206).

The reason a story told just for entertainment would be an ineffective tool for instruction is because it involves  a passive audience.  An effective story, however, is both entertaining and instructive because its instructive potential in fact stems from its entertainment value.  Heath and Heath refer to studies showing that an instructive, entertaining story actually puts the audience more in the role of the story's protagonist than the detached observer.  One process that gets an audience more involved in a story is called mental simulation, and is "not as good as actually doing something," write Heath and Heath, "but it's the next best thing...  Stories are like flight simulators for the brain" (213).  Essentially, an effective story is a kind of simulation.  It provides the immersion necessary to get an audience to fully grasp a concept through a combination of entertainment and inspiration, and it requires them to actually get in the story and work through it in their own head as if they actually experienced it.  The story of Jared Fogel, told through Subway's famous advertising campaign, is a perfect example.  It is entertaining, inspiring, and immersive  - all of which are part of what makes a story stick.

Sept. 3 - Getting Involved 

Chapter 3 of Design to Thrive details the various reasons for building communities online.  It lists ten different reasons before describing each one of them in detail, but the main point I took away from the chapter as a whole is that they all relate to interconnectedness.  For instance, the first point, which I feel is the most valuable of the ten as it applies in some way to each one of them except reducing costs, talks about "intellectual capital."  This concept is perhaps one of the most fundamentally useful aspects of social media: through open communication available only through online communities such as blogs and forums, members and visitors alike are able to draw from information posted by others while contributing their own input to what I like to call a sort of collective hive.  The "hive mind" resulting from these unique media can quickly become loaded with information put forth by not one, but every individual who contributes, creating a single entity of collected data.  This, I feel, is the basis of why social media has become such a powerful force in the digital age.

Gillin's chapter on social media engagement discusses the value in tapping into what he calls various "conversations" online, and gets into specific ways one might go about accessing such information.  The first step, he explains, is simply realizing that there now exists a vastly more diverse and extensive network of information online than ever before.  To increase one's social media awareness is to involve oneself in social networks and become exposed to new opportunities and resources online.  Another way to uncover information through social media is to use search engines and websites, as well as the various features available through those resources.  For instance, one little-known Google feature which I've used throughout my college career narrows search results to include only those resources available through academic institutions; simply typing "site:.edu" before a search phrase will yield results coming only from sites ending in ".edu".  One wonders how, without references such as Gillin's text, anyone might go about learning the extensive features of such resources as Google, but it seems the best way to do so is to simply get involved in social media.  In drawing from and contributing to intellectual capital available through those media, it's often surprising how easily one can find useful information online.