Social Studies Blog

It’s Day 2, and I have both laptops and a Blackberry fully-charged! YES!

The first panel I hit was ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy in Here? with Chris Messina.

Here are my notes with key takeaways:

• A lifestream organizes information not as a file cabinet does but roughly as a mind does.
• The social media we create is largely created on files and folders and data structures that are based on ways computers understand information, not the way humans do.A stream flows because time flows, and the stream is a concrete representation of the past.
• Snack Sized Socialty: we’re only experiencing a fraction of the content streams.
• We have all of this information, but we don’t have enough brain to consume it.
• Kevin Rose says he expects some day his kids will be able to go back into time to see where he went using his Foursquare data.
• Having this social data, social residue is fascinating as a history and legacy perspective for our heirs.
• If you had access to all of your data at both macro and micro levels, you could learn a lot about yourself (how much you eat, how long your relationships last, how far you travel, etc)
• More info here Activitystream.ms

The next panel I hit was Big Brother in Your Brain: Neuroscience and Marketing with Roger Dooley from Hobsons, Gary Koepke from Modernista!, Eric Kogelschatz from shark&minnow, Dr AK Pradeep from NeuroFocus Inc, Dr. Danielle Stolzenberg, PH D from University of Virginia.

This panel started off with a too-deep overview of neurological function from Stolzenberg and then a too elementary description of the need for marketers to use research from Kogelschatz. The format was overly scripted, and the audience got restless quickly.

Koepke says we’ve been studying the brain for a long time, and he’s found that when working as a marketer, we often need to switch off your fore-brain and let our subconscious come up with creative solutions to a problem. It’s irrational and strategic at the same time.

Dr. Pradeep saved the panel at this point by showing this video, which is a riot:

Koepke showed a new car commercial with the tagline, “When you turn your car on, does it return the favor?” and brought up Axe and Old Spice commercials that use sexy, humor and even discomfort to get attention. Even the Old Spice ad teases the marketing industry. Irreverance can sell.

Dooley says our purchase decisions are influenced by things we don’t see. Even choice architecture (what inventory item is presented first in an online catalog) has a 250 percent impact. Decoy products help impact choice, too. All marketing tries to change consumer behavior. Neuromarketing is just another tool. Good companies would never manipulate customers into a decision they would regret later.

Koepke says the Pet Rock and Snuggie prove that anything can catch onto a trend or people’s consciousness and become successful. He doubts anyone could have constructed those for success using neuroscience.

Pradeep says humans don’t have the language to verbalize the full extent of their pschological and emotional response to art and marketing. Neuro-marketing helps us identify what parts of the experience humans enjoy/respond to.

The opening keynote was on the topic Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity with danah boyd (which I’ve spelled in lower case because she insists on spelling her name in lower case) from Microsoft Research. danah is an ethnographer who spends most of her time working to discern how people use social media in their daily lives.

Here are my notes with key takeaways from the panel.

• Privacy is not dead, and people very much care about privacy regardless of how old they are — both online and off.
• But what privacy means is fundabmentally having control over how information flows, understanding social setting, context and how to behave.
• When people feel as though they don’t have control over these variables, they scream privacy fail.
• She cites Google Buzz’s auto-friend feature upon-launch they later apologized for.
• Google integrated a public-facing system inside the privacy of the e-mail infrastructure. The result is that a lot of users genuinely believed that Google was exposing their private e-mail to the world.
• Google assumed people would opt-out of Buzz if they didn’t want to participate.
• Not that Google was, but more and more tech companies are indeed forcing users to certain behaviors and then apologize later when criticized.
• People actually thought if they opted out it would cancel their Gmail account.
• Companies must make sure people understand the value proposition. They won’t watch your video. It must be intuitive.
• Google told people what they wanted to hear rather than asking them.
• With the auto-friend feature, Google managed to find the social equivalent of the “uncanny valley,” where something is supposed to be human-like and real but isn’t quite real.
• Just because something is publicly-accessible, doesn’t mean that people want it to be publicized.
• When you chat with a close friend, there’s always the chance that the friend will turn around and share you’re discussion.
• When you’re at a coffee shop, you expect the people around you are anonymous, and you as you assess the situation, you don’t expect your mother from 1,000 miles away to come in.
• When people enter a situation, they augment their behavior based on who may be around, hear, share, etc.
• Security through obscurity is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Technorati shows the average blog is read by six people. You have a better sense of who is paying attention a cafe, but even online people are fairly obscure.
• Online, people aren’t good at reacting to changes when an online community changes — particularly when a social network goes mainstream.
• For example, Facebook resetting privacy settings last year. The default choice for sharing with just friends or public was “public.” Only 35 percent of users read the settings and closed their privacy settings. That means 65 percent of people have wide open profiles, and danah doesn’t think any of them realize it.
• There’s a big difference between publicly available data and publicizing this data. It’s a case of PII (publicly identifiable information) vs. PEI (publicly embarrassing information).
• It’s easy to be private and public in physical situations but a lot harder online. Teens want to be seen online by their peers but not by people who have power over them (parents).
• Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.
• In the last 30 days, Justin Bieber was in the top trending topics for 18 days straight. For all the claims that teens aren’t tweeting, his 3.2 million followers are not that old.
• If you follow the memes that get a lot of traction, you’ll find a lot of black users are out there loud and proud.
• There is a large amount of racism and classism on social media. During the BET Awards, there were a lot of negative tweets, which reinforced that not everyone is welcome in the social Web.
• Chatroulette is an example of the privacy/publicity mashups that are yet to come.
• Marketers, just because you can see people talking about your brands online doesn’t mean those people want you to see them.

I ended the day attending Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy, FTW. I’m friends with Kristina and have seen her present on her concept of “content as a strategy,” which is opposite of “content is a feature.”

Here’s her definition: Content Strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Kristina is a huge advocate for involving content experts, Web writers, folks responsible for text, visuals, video, etc. in the design and architecture from the very beginning of a project. Kristina runs through examples of Web sites who do content strategy poorly (Quicken.com) and well (Mint.com).

She says to look at your organization’s content and ask yourself if the content helps achieve your business objectives and user goals. So many companies fall into the trap of putting too much information or non-news up just for the sake of solving every user scenario or posting updating content.

REI.com has a team dedicated to posting adventure content, with an editorial calendar to ensure new content is posted. It adds value to the user experience — both in-store and online. Room & Board’s mission statement says they work closely with real artisans to build furniture. On their Web sites, they’ve done articles, interviews and photo series with the people who build their furniture. They currently staff two people for keeping content fresh.

For your sites, you have to have a quantitative content audit, and she doesn’t care if it’s painful. You must map the terrain to understand where you are now before you can map out where you’re going to go.

If you’re interested in this emerging field, she has a great book out now called “Content Strategy for the Web.”

Tags: content management, lifestreaming, neuroscience marketing, Privacy, sxsw