Disqus - Latest Comments for gravity7

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Brands, and putting twitter word of mouth in context

gravity7 — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:41:04 -0000

folks, @chrisheuer has a great post today on Brian Solis' blog closely related to this: http://www.briansolis.com/2009/10/market-engage...

He suggests we shift attention to the market, and offers the idea for a netTrust score as an alternative to the netPromoter score. Needless to say, I think consumer brand promotion misses the great variety of ways in which consumers identify with and through brands in talk and activity on social media.

Re: Market Engagement Optimization (MEO) and NetTrust Score

gravity7 — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:33:36 -0000

Great post Chris. I like the shift of emphasis from netPromoter to netTrust, as it really gets at the importance of viewing audience participation as a two-way street, more mutually beneficial if reciprocal and conversational.

I wonder if components of netTrust might include different kinds of social capital. I've been thinking recently in terms of the market's sociability, as you note, and wondering if for different kinds of brands/companies there might be different kinds of capital at work. Say, social capital as trust capital, reputation capital, aspirational or attraction capital, credibility capital, among others.

Brands get attention off the talk that propagates them across an audience, either tightly, within a consumer's social graph, socially, or broadly and publicly. This all has to do with the proximity consumers feel towards a brand, and which is reflected in how they identify with and through it.

The thing about marketing is it always has to legitimate its medium as well as its message. That's where capitalism and its message and values differ from traditional social values (which come by means of social and cultural traditions). The audience on social media can be so much more effective for distribution and visibility because it works through personal and social relationships, and through the attention people give each other and seek for themselves.

We're still unable to measure and quantify this deeply but it seems only a matter of time before we learn the social patterns and discourses that can tell us what moves and audience and how. It would be interesting to sit down and capture what would go into the netTrust score. We should do that!

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Social Interaction Design: Ratings

gravity7 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:38:57 -0000

Christina Wodke (@cwodtke) tweeted a couple excellent references on ratings worth sharing here:
http://bit.ly/47fF73
http://bit.ly/164THE

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews

gravity7 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:14:38 -0000

Agreed. Now the upside of Yelp is it ought to be the more attractive venue for experts -- Yelp needs to find new ways to up the quality of reviews there and shunt social reviewing and profiling away from merchants. Foursquare is more the twitter version of this genre, and as such is a more fitting match for mobile and geo, as well as augmented reality future social media practices. However it's not for everyone, and isnt going to attract experts unless Fsquare implements features that better support what you know over where you go....
The opportunities here are endless. I wouldn't be surprised if in a year we can subscribe to folks and go where they go and engage in a kind of "i'm having what he's having" socially-sourced menu of places, activities, food and drinks and so on. Foursquare, or an app like it, could even pull a mahalo and offer Q/A recommendations...
Once you have the frame of activities and the theme of the social practices, you can design features to support this stuff pretty easily. Let the social practice drive the design. No need to throw noodles at the wall if you know what your basic interaction models are!

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews

gravity7 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:05:48 -0000

Thanks ken. I'm going to keep rolling out core insights from a social interaction design perspective. The trick to making a lot of this stuff work is wrapping the content experience in a second frame of activity. By structuring and organizing activity that's a distinct and separate experience from that of the content itself, you can get users to engage without their having to engage on the content directly. I'll do Yahoo Fantasy next, as that's another great example of how a game has been built about a game.

It's all frames of interaction. The social web supplies new possibilities for interesting frames, from socializing w/ friends to social gaming, from building an encyclopedia to publicizing your work life..

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard

gravity7 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:04:47 -0000

Absolutely -- this wasn't a post on different kinds of leaderboards so much as a rebuttal of a sort to assigning incentives to the leaderboard. I wanted to show that social meaning to the user is a different (in my view more better) way of explaining how they work. Not by means of incentives belonging to leaderboards, applying universally.

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Social media: the attention economy explained

gravity7 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:58:31 -0000

I view this all as communication, which means that silence is the lack of response or socially meaningful activity. Silence then creates ambiguity a) for its intentionality and b) in its form and c) how to respond. Intended silence, silence that "says something" or not , and whether silence is an appeal for communication. From the perspective of social action that I'm always drawing on, silence is inaction interesting for the ambiguity of its meaning, which creates issues for those considering taking it up as meaningful communication.

These posts are much more to the issue I think though, than this one.

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2009/03/cont...
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2008/10/post...
http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2009/06/if-y...

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Socially-mediated branding: identify yourself

gravity7 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:45:01 -0000

They say there were only three things you could do with a product: change the contents, the vehicle, or the packaging. Old school still has value, but the distribution "channels" are being disrupted by the massive amount of consumer talk facilitated by social media. I think the smartest response by brands would be to think in terms of conversational strategies, and of faceted branding. E.g. multiple storylines, multiple references to value, price, quality, popularity, newness, etc to leverage the different kinds of consumers out there. Pitching these claims in forms and with content that's easily revangelized by consumers and in their own words would then trade messaging control in for authenticity.

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Socially-mediated branding: identify yourself

gravity7 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:40:45 -0000

Thanks Steve,

I think it's only natural that brands communicate their identity, after all that's really what branding is about. It crafted, of course, and the message fine-tuned, to address market segments and so on.

The logic of the piece, and which comes full circle in the last para, is that identity isn't actually something possessed but is a never-ending processing of identification: and that involves people, ideas, activities, objects, you name it. Socially-mediated branding would then involve brands taking a further step towards the consumer, and by identifying with the consumer, seeing themselves and their identity in the way it's really reflected in the market that matters to them.

Furthermore, as social media are a means by which consumers wittingly or unwittingly volunteer and communicate tastes and interests (some brand related, but many activity related) to friends and peers, the real engine for brand messaging is the consumer's own voice, and the real distribution system is his/her relationships. As consumers identify with each other, with cultural pastimes, etc, they voice the brand.

In fact I think I might call it revangelizing. Because it's often re:the brand, and repetition by authentic voice in social media beats generic and non-targeted marketing any day. If what the brand wants is proximity. (Lux brands benefit from their unreachability).

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:55:44 -0000

Greg,
Here you go. A number of visualizations, some you can probably use:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_t...

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:35:37 -0000

kim,
thanks -- again, the "types" are for framing purposes only, not as descriptions of real people. For that, we're lucky in the social web to have real people already!
On my not addressing usability here you're right. But usability is already well entrenched and valued. I'm interested in what's not yet been addressed or framed yet, and that would be social interactions and practices. Usability comes out of user-software interaction framework; mine is a user-software-user framework.

thanks!
adrian

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:32:07 -0000

greg -- that's not mine. i recognize it but the editor wisely added it so there'd be something to look at. ;-)

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:30:16 -0000

sncr.org seems fine now

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Social media: the attention economy explained

gravity7 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:04:56 -0000

adina,

i like what you say about quiet, but isnt that the same as time? or better, time during which there's no reply or activity? viewed from communication, it's inactivity, which i think is automatically ambiguous because there's no possible way of knowing if it means anything. for me silence is a meaning problem.

but that's far astray of this post. i have several older posts on writing, ambiguity, and discontinuities of the medium.

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Social media: the attention economy explained

gravity7 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:59:47 -0000

marc,

I like to distinguish between capital and currency too -- capital always has two forms: money and capital. money is spent, capital is invested.

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2009/04/soci...

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:40:07 -0000

Sounds like you fill your time wisely!

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:39:17 -0000

Liz,
The diversity of habits and social uses on twitter is vast indeed! I think that the less a social tool is "designed," that is, the more open it is, the more social practices end up handling its many "use cases." It would be great to have data on these social dynamics, and on whether clusters or cultures can be distinguished among them. Birds of like feather, so to speak; or tribes, if it's more appropriate to emphasize social over identity.

cheers,
adrian

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:35:42 -0000

In terms of developing a status, you make an important point. I've got no claim to people being a particular type though. I think that would be a stretch. I offer the types as a means of taking different user perspectives when designing for social adoption. And as a means of thinking not from product or platform perspectives but from user experiences.

In terms of trust and expertise, credibility is indeed accrued with the help of those who trust you and your opinions etc. But aside from who we are and what we know, the medium does amplify and sometimes bias how we appear. Personal strategies can come into play in how users (or brands) use the medium to their advantage.

cheers,
adrian

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:26:53 -0000

Maybe he did and if that's the case then it's my bad. For what it's worth though, I started writing on social interaction design four years ago ;-)

cheers,
adrian

Re: Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

gravity7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:24:18 -0000

Lisa, I should have been clear that I don't mean sociable in the sense we often mean it. I'm trying to move away from use > usability to social, and that's how I came up with sociability. You're right, there are many personalities and interests behind the social dynamics we see around social media. Architectures and design shape that, but so too do relationships and communication. I just think that "use" is misleading for its emphasis on the software's usability, where in social media the interaction is between people also, if not moreso, than the standard interaction of user and application.

cheers!
adrian

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/09/should-real-time-trends-get-real-time.html

gravity7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:18:31 -0000

Louis,
The idea of making trends more powerful and useful is great, and attributing referentiality makes sense. But there's a whole type of trend/word that you left out: speech. If I saw a lot of "Niners" yesterday, not because the Niners were playing (they were) but because fans were rooting for them with the phrase "Go Niners". So there are a lot of terms that are used in statements whose "meaning" is as much their function as a kind of speech act as it is a reference to things happening in the real world.

What makes "Go Niners" then interesting is not just that the team is playing, or even that they're winning, but that fans are excited: this is a dimension that matters to adverisers/analytics...

So there's not just a term : denotation reference structure at work; and all terms trending are not just news (as you point out), even if they may seem to become news for the reason that they're trending "topics."

Re: Social Media Consulting and Strategy by a Social Interaction Design Specialist: Social capital on twitter: analytics of flow

gravity7 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:43:33 -0000

I see social media as a new "means of production" and talk as a means of distribution. Mapping distribution and correlating to social graph for types of influence is where it's at (or will be at!)

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

gravity7 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:49:11 -0000

Thanks!

I'll let Goffman respond here. Granted, mediated talk works differently than f2f, but the gist is in here nonetheless!

"Thus, as Adam Smith argued in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, the individual must phrase his own concerns and feelings and interests in such a way as to make these maximally usable by the others as a source of appropriate involvement; and this major obligation of the individual qua interactant is balanced by his right to expect that other present will make some effort to stir up their sympathies and place them at his command. These two tendencies, that of the speaker to scale down his expressions and that of the listeners to scale up their interests, each in the light of the other's capacities and demands, form the bridge that people build to one another, allowing them to meet for a moment of talk in a communion of reciprocally sustained involvement. It is this spark, not the more obvious kinds of love, that lights up the world." Erving Goffman Interaction Ritual 116

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Sociability: Usability for Social Media

gravity7 — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:31:35 -0000

I agree with you. My point is meant to emphasize the social context of interactions around social media. These to me are as much interactions with other people as they are with the product, and its content (as presented). This is why we need to understand the presentation layer not just as constraining choices and actions, but as facilitating the kinds of social activity that are familiar, interesting, comfortable, or what have you, to users.

From my perspective it's in the social, not in the information, that this really plays out. Much of the economic theory around this is at some level still interested in utility; choices reflect values; values and behaviors may reflect socio-psychological factors. It's still choice theory though. The agent is an individual, behavior and action are individual.

I think that in social media, action is oriented to the social "space." Much of it involves how people think of themselves, see themselves, want to be seen, think of others, and so on. All of which manifest in how people appeal to the social for responses, communication, visibility, etc.

Simplified, I suppose, social action may include but is not limited to economic behaviors and choices. Nor does even economic theory of irrational behavior have a good communication model (one that is inter-subjective, meaning individuals interpret each others' behavior).

A lot of that stuff comes out of market theory, with broad-stroke views of social phenomena as effects of individual choices. Much of what I rely on comes from talk and speech situations, interaction situations, and the pragmatics of social interaction (gestures, cues, face, etc).

Re: Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Activity Streams: Content and Flow

gravity7 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:28:10 -0000

Goog reader is already capitalizing on comments and sharing and with some success. A similar reader for streamed messages would make a lot of sense, and in some ways this is Fbook's recent implementation of update tagging.

It seems we all agree on the opportunities to be had from meta data about the stream.

thanks!