The Problem of Group Management
Visualization of my LinkedIn network, automatically generated through inMaps.
As I have been contemplating SXSW this year, one thing that struck me was that, unlike previous years, there wasn’t a clear “winner” in terms of a new technology or platform.
The reason for all the attention that the technology and advertising industries lavish on SXSW is due to the fact that, for the past several years, it’s been the site of the popularization of a game-changing technology. Twitter in 2007. Foursquare in 2009 (as a new idea) and 2010 (as a popular, extensible platform).
In 2011, there didn’t seem to be a breakout app or service, despite the best effort of what felt like thousands of startups equipped with flyers, schwag, and scantily clad volunteers.
Aside from their over-aggressive marketing tactics, one thing that several of these start-ups had in common was an attempt at solving a common problem: group management.
The way that human beings socialize in real life doesn’t match how software treats us online; I don’t really have 290 equally important friends in my life the way that Facebook displays them. Instead, I have a core group of friends who I socialize with on the weekends, a group of people who I work with, a whole bunch of other groups whom I’ve worked with in the past, friends from college, friends from high school, and family members - not to mention a few miscellaneous acquaintances I’ve met and lost touch with over the years. Status updates that are intended for my friends are sometimes offensive to my devout Christian cousins, and - like many people - I find my self second-guessing what I post, since I know it will be visible to my coworkers and boss.
This is not a new insight. In fact, Facebook tried to solve this problem with its introduction of Groups in October 2010. The project garnered a ton of attention from tech bloggers, but, 6 months later, it’s rarely mentioned (Facebook hasn’t published usage data, but anecdotally it doesn’t seem that many folks are using it).
Several companies at SXSW gave the group challenge a shot - GroupMe,Hashable, and Hurricane Party all approached the problem in a different ways.
However, as with Facebook Groups, none of these apps seemed to really take off. Real-life social circles are incredibly complex. Right now, it seems to be impossible for software to handle the fluidity and complexity of social groups without requiring users to manually maintain complex lists of membership rules - which no one has time to do. And even if such magical solution could exist, I’m not sure how comfortable consumers would be with an automated solution to something so important to the way that we socialize.
So is there a way to manage groups that’s not manual? I can’t think of a solution at the moment, but history is full of solutions to problems that previously seemed insolvable. This will be an interesting space to watch over the next few years.
Shifting deck chairs on the Titanic
There’s a strange undertone at many of the advertising-related SXSW panels this year. The past few years have involved discussions of Twitter, platforms, transmedia, etc. This year there’s still a lot of that, but it feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of the real issues.
Communication has changed, media has changed, and yet advertisers are still living in the agency-client model that has been consistent for the past 50 years. I don’t think that hiring a social media expert, or creating a new department, or using a few new shiny tools is going to get us far enough.
I don’t have a solution. But the situation for advertisers in 2011 is starting to remind me a lot of the music industry in 2001. There’s a sea change coming, and I worry that all the little changes we’re making are blinding us to exactly how huge it is.
On the value of privacy
Over the past few weeks my RSS feed has been clogged with articles bemoaning Facebook’s changing privacy policy.
To summarize the situation for those who may not have been following it: since its launch in 2004 as a closed college network, Facebook’s settings have increasingly favored making knowledge public rather than private. The definition of “public” has also changed (information that used to be available only to one’s social network can now be accessed by anyone). Facebook has also made a series of questionable design decisions that make it more difficult to change one’s settings. For a good summary of the privacy changes, check out this visualization.
There’s absolutely no doubt that information on Facebook is increasingly public. But what I find interesting is the almost universal uproar that these changes have caused. The word “privacy” has become a sacred cow - it is equated with “good”, and the word “public” has become equated with “bad”. I think this is a simplistic view.
Everyone deserves to be in control of their personal information, and Facebook has done a particularly poor job of empowering people to take this control (danah boyd outlines several aspects of the problems with Facebook’s privacy settings in this article). However, I’m not sure that universal privacy is the answer here.
Sharing information - both about our surroundings and about each other - is one of the most critical and useful parts of being human. We routinely applaud the social media revolution for requiring companies and celebrities to be more honest, transparent, and responsive. Why wouldn’t the same apply to individuals?
Facebook certainly deserves to be chastised for their lack of transparency in making the changes to their platform. But I am routinely inspired by the ways in which society, commerce, and communication are enhanced by open communications. To me and my social circle, Facebook is an important part of that inspiration.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If I Can Dream - How Digital is Changing Our Definition of Entertainment
This week marked the launch of the very first online-based reality TV show. ‘If I Can Dream’ is a new series from American Idol creator Simon Fuller that takes five Hollywood hopefuls (all quite attractive, obviously) and places them in a beautiful house where they are taped 24-7 as they try to live their dreams. Think ‘American Idol’ meets ‘Big Brother’. This article from Fast Company describes the vibe pretty well:
“The evocative pipes of Elvis, lingering shots of five impossibly pulchritudinous young ‘uns in underwear wafting around an impossibly beautiful house. A cross between Idol and Big Brother, the show—the first to be streamed via the Internet on Hulu— follows a wannabe model, three actors and a musician as they try to make it big in the town of Tinsel. The social media presence is overwhelming. You can tweet, FB, MySpace, blog and sms the quintet and, if one of them should make it big, vote to choose their replacement.”
What’s interesting about this show is that, at the moment, it is entirely digital. In addition to episodes airing on Hulu, it has a highly interactive web site that allows you to watch the house live, 24-7, from the point of view of over 50 cameras. You can track the individual cast members and dynamically follow them as they move throughout the house, focus on a single room, or just watch the producer’s selection of the most interesting things happening at the moment.
So what does it mean?
The world’s becoming digital
Five years ago, or even one year ago, there’s no question that this show would have been launched in partnership with a major television network. But as all forms of entertainment become increasingly digital, it makes more sense to publish the show online. Producer Michael Herwick breaks it down:
“[Young people] digest the internet, they’re socially interactive, and they’re shooting their own videos on YouTube and getting discovered. We’re just saying that’s where it’s at right now, and we’re creating a project around that.”
This approach seems to resonate with the target demographic. A few commenters on a Perez Hilton post discussing the show say:
“I always watch American Idol on line.. These days people don’t watch TV.. Unless there’s no internet..” -evancalo
“I fucking LOVE HULU! Down with paying for cable!” -holyfuck
Celebrity requires interaction
“Someone tweet me and tell me what I should do” - Giglianne, the aspiring model.
I am not a fan of reality shows, but because of my husband’s involvement, I’ve been tuning into the site periodically. And the moment that hooked me was when, on the day the cast moved in, they all sat around a television that was showing live Twitter comments and questions directed at them. The cast immediately began to interact with the fans - making shout-outs, answering questions, and just chatting. This level of interactivity allows for fans to be more than just a passive audience, and that decision was made by design:
“I am determined to continue challenging convention and pushing the boundaries of mainstream entertainment. The next frontier is the video world of authentic real-time interaction. ‘If I Can Dream’ experiments with technology to provide for the first time a complete open-door opportunity that allows the viewer to experience reality in a way never before attempted.” - Simon Fuller
Modern day celebrities are increasingly interacting with their fans - just look at all the celebs on Twitter. It’s interesting to think that, in years to come, this type of interaction and a sense of responsibility towards fans might become standard.
Always-on entertainment
Another interesting aspect of the show is that it’s always on. The 30-minute Hulu program is really only a small piece of the overall effort. Producer Michael Herwick describes Fuller’s vision:
“I think Simon’s vision was to give people complete access into what it really takes to try to make it in Hollywood. He said that nobody’s ever shown that world in a legitimate sort of way, and he wanted to give complete access to it. I also think that he really loved the idea of video communication and that the whole world is so interconnected, everyone’s video chatting. It just felt like a natural fit for modern technology.”
In advertising, we talk a lot about how digital has shifted from initiative based efforts to always-on platforms. It’s interesting to think that this shift might be happening in entertainment as well.
What does it all mean?
When I was watching the site on Tuesday evening, I started to get a strange feeling. The voyeurism of watching the cast in the house- live, unfiltered- combined with their interactions with viewers on Twitter felt slightly uncomfortable (and very unfamiliar), but it was also extremely compelling. I couldn’t turn it off. It felt completely and utterly new. To throw some marketing speak into the mix, it felt like I was watching a paradigm shifting. And that’s not a feeling that I get often.
We know that digital technology has changed the ways in which we connect with one another. We know that it changes our behaviors. Now we’re seeing how it can change our very definition of, and expectations from, entertainment.
Full disclosure: My husband, a partner at Poke, led all the digital for this project. So I’ve been hearing about the show for over a year (and ate a lot of dinners alone while he worked late on it!). However, any opinions expressed here are, as always, my own.
Consider Digital from the Beginning
Three-year-old boy: This is an iPhone, it can play YouTube videos.
Three-year-old girl: I know.
And this — my dear clients, marketers, colleagues, and friends — is why you have to consider digital from the beginning. Your audience certainly will.
Via Overheard in New York.
