Social Proof Marketing
Ailleen Lee: In the age of the social web, social proof is the new marketing; http://eicker.at/SocialProofMarketing
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Gerrit Eicker
Spiral of Silence
Does social media end the spiral of silence? Probably not, but it might lessen its impact; http://eicker.at/SpiralOfSilence
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Gerrit Eicker
RFERL: “Social Media And Ending ‘The Spiral Of Silence’ – There’s been a spate of good pieces on digital activism recently. ‘Technology Review‘ had a great story on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, detailing all the ways activists used social networking (among other online and offline tools) to get people out on the streets. – There was also an interesting piece in ‘The New York Times‘ reporting on a new paper that argued that social-networking tools can ‘make you passive, can sap your initiative, (and) leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.’ This wasn’t an exercise in moral techno-panics (this is your brain on social media!), but looked at how, in the eyes of the report’s author, social media actually kept people off the streets during the Egyptian crisis. Or: Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action… When people think of social media and revolutions, I think the tendency is to think solely of activists organizing rallies on Twitter and Facebook (they do do that too.) But more important seems to be the way that social media and shared cell phone video footage help in building a shared consciousness, or as Tufekci calls it a ‘visible momentum.’”
Tufekci, TR: “New Media and the People-Powered Uprisings – Another key dynamic is what’s known as ‘preference falsification’ to political scientists and ‘pluralistic ignorance’ to social psychologists: when people privately hold a particular view but do not share it in fear of reprisal, punishment, or violating a social norm. In autocracies, this can cause a ‘spiral of silence‘ in which many wish for regime change, but are afraid to speak up outside of few trusted ties. … It is in this context Facebook ‘likes’ of dissident pages such as ‘We are All Khaled Said,’ sharing of videos of regime brutality, online expressions of political anger, and acceptances of Facebook ‘invitations’ to protest all matter as they help build a visible momentum which, itself, is a condition of success. A public is not created just because everyone individually holds an opinion but because there is multi-level awareness of other people’s views leading to a spiral of action and protest. (I know that you know that I know that you know that we know …). – That is why the new media ecology is a game-changer and that is exactly the process John Pollock’s extensive on-the-ground reporting unravels. … There has been a false debate. Was it social media or the people? Was it social media or the labor movements? Was it social media or anti-imperialist movement? Was it social media or youth? These questions are wrong and the answer is yes. The correct question is how.”
UT: “Neumann (1974) introduced the ‘spiral of silence’ as an attempt to explain in part how public opinion is formed. She wondered why the Germans supported wrong political positions that led to national defeat, humiliation and ruin in the 1930s-1940s. … The closer a person believes the opinion held is similar to the prevailing public opinion, the more they are willing to openly disclose that opinion in public. Then, if public sentiment changes, the person will recognize that the opinion is less in favor and will be less willing to express that opinion publicly. As the perceived distance between public opinion and a person’s personal opinion grows, the more unlikely the person is to express their opinion.”
Wikipedia: “The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. The theory asserts that a person is less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if one feels that one is in the minority for fear of reprisal or isolation from the majority. … The spiral of silence begins with fear of reprisal or isolation, and escalates from there. The fear of isolation is the centrifugal force that accelerates the spiral of silence. Individuals use what is described as ‘an innate ability’ or quasi-statistical sense to gauge public opinion. The Mass media play a large part in determining what the dominant opinion is, since our direct observation is limited to a small percentage of the population. The mass media have an enormous impact on how public opinion is portrayed, and can dramatically impact an individual’s perception about where public opinion lies, whether or not that portrayal is factual. Noelle-Neumann describes the spiral of silence as a dynamic process, in which predictions about public opinion become fact as mass media’s coverage of the majority opinion becomes the status quo, and the minority becomes less likely to speak out. The theory, however, only applies to moral or opinion issues, not issues that can be proven right or wrong using facts (if there, in fact, exists a distinction between fact and value).“
Gerrit Eicker
Rare
Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of rare is changing in the age of information abundance; http://eicker.at/Rare
Gerrit Eicker
Online Activities
Pew: Social networks are on the rise, but eMail and search continue to lead online activities; http://eicker.at/OnlineActivities
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Gerrit Eicker
According to Pew research, social networking is a daily activity for 65% of onliners in 2011, compared to 11% in 2005.
Pew: “Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email. Since the Pew Internet Project began measuring adults’ online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web.”
Pew: “Email and search form the core of online communication and online information gathering, respectively. And they have done so for nearly a decade, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. … Perhaps surprisingly for an online activity that has been around for a while, search is most popular among the youngest adult internet users (those age 18-29), 96% of whom use search engines to find information online. But even among the oldest internet users (age 65+), 87% are search engine users. … Email is similar to search (and many other online activities) in that the youngest online adults, the college-educated, and those in the highest income categories are more likely than others to engage in the activity.“
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Timely Tweets
Twitter starts adding Promoted Tweets advertising to users‘ timelines with Timely Tweets; http://eicker.at/TwitterTimelyTweets
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “[W]e’re introducing a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly, by placing them at or near the top of your timeline. These Promoted Tweets will scroll through the timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once. Promoted Tweets can also be easily dismissed from your timeline with a single click. – We’ll be rolling out and testing this new offering over the next several weeks with a select group of partners… From the start, our philosophy around advertising has been simple: We put our users first and strive to create products that enrich the Twitter experience for every Twitter user.”
RWW: “How do you leverage an attention economy in a newsfeed world? If you’re a brand on Twitter, you can now pay to give your Tweets privileged placement in the streams of your followers. … I expect it will work well. Will the company ever start serving up ads from branded accounts it believes you are likely to be interested in (and who pay for it)? Maybe. The relationship between promoted Tweets in search, in the stream and promoted accounts will be interesting to watch. … The future is here, it’s being Tweeted and now there’s pre-roll. Keep it under 140 characters and I find it hard to object. It looks like a very smart system to me.”
VB: “For in-stream promoted tweets, only users who follow the account that sends the promoted tweet will see the ad, and the ads can be hidden from the stream on a one-by-one basis. … Putting these tweets out of chronological order is a bit of a departure from how the Twitter timeline has always worked, and it’s likely to cause some rancor among the service’s users. … ‘We’re seeing incredible engagement numbers – between 3 percent and 5 percent on average for Promoted Tweets… We’ve seen some as high as 52 percent,‘ said [Twitter spokesperson Carolyn] Penner… Twitter defines engagement as a clickthrough, but it also counts retweets, replies and favorites in its engagement numbers – meaning that part of the ROI includes one-on-one conversations with fans of the brand.”
TNW: “This is obviously a nice improvement for advertisers on Twitter as it greatly increases the chances that a user is going to see a Promoted Tweet if it’s surfaced. If a user follows a couple hundred people, they’re likely to miss a single Tweet unless they’re checking the service constantly. This way the ad can be delivered when the user is actually on the service.”
TC: “[T]his is clearly Twitter biggest move into the money-making waters yet. Will it work? We’ll see, but it’s clearly the next logical step for the Promoted Products. After months of perfecting them in search and on the sidebar, now they’ll be put to the real test. We should see quickly if users begin to unfollow brands as a result, or if the engagement rates go through the roof. If it’s the former, it’s back to the drawing board (again) for Twitter. If it’s the latter, it could be time to think of Twitter as a serious business.”
Forrester: “The bottom line: it’s ok to use paid media in your social marketing efforts but it’s best to start by dipping your toe. The risk isn’t in cost (most of these ads are performance based), it’s in alienating your customers. Take a similar approach the social networks are taking: focus on your organic efforts and the user experience first, then try out paid media to accelerate your efforts.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Navigation Bar
The new Google Navigation Bar will make Google Plus a success: a tiny red square against the big blue; http://eicker.at/GoogleNavigationBar
Gerrit Eicker
Attention Economy
Scientists validate Dunbar’s number in Twitter conversations; http://eicker.at/AttentionEconomy (via @paisleybeebe)
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Gerrit Eicker
Goncalves, Perra, Vespignani: “Modern society’s increasing dependency on online tools for both work and recreation opens up unique opportunities for the study of social interactions. A large survey of online exchanges or conversations on Twitter, collected across six months involving 1.7 million individuals is presented here. We test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number. We find that users can entertain a maximum of 100-200 stable relationships in support for Dunbar’s prediction. The ‘economy of attention’ is limited in the online world by cognitive and biological constraints as predicted by Dunbar’s theory. Inspired by this empirical evidence we propose a simple dynamical mechanism, based on finite priority queuing and time resources, that reproduces the observed social behavior. … Social networks have changed they way we use to communicate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge number of other individuals. In this paper we show that social networks did not change human social capabilities. We analyze a large dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving millions of individuals to test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number. We found that even in the online world cognitive and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar’s theory limiting users social activities. We propose a simple model for users’ behavior that includes finite priority queuing and time resources that reproduces the observed social behavior. This simple model offers a basic explanation of a seemingly complex phenomena observed in the empirical patterns on Twitter data and offers support to Dunbar’s hypothesis of a biological limit to the number of relationships.”
Brooks: “If the thing that makes it real is your capacity to have a theory of mind relationship with a certain number of people, I can still imagine that social media would increase people’s capacities. … If [social media tools] succeed they will slowly break Dunbar’s number. … I would expect that Twitter would have a small number of people with a huge number of connections, but they’re not listening to that many people, they’re just talking to that many people.”
Gerrit Eicker
The Audience is Listening. Online.
Every media sector is losing audience now except online; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia2011
Gerrit Eicker
Friends
Social network sites do not increase offline social network size or relations; http://eicker.at/Friends (via @gedankenstuecke)
Gerrit Eicker
Passive Experience
GlobalWebIndex: Open web turns to packaged internet, passive experience to rise; http://eicker.at/PassiveExperience (via @rww)
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Gerrit Eicker
GlobalWebIndex: “Social media has reached mass maturity. Today it’s no longer about massive growth but a shift of already active social consumers to ‘real-time’ technologies, such as status updates or tweets. The old view of text-based social media, defined by blogs and forums, is being surpassed, moving the impact of social media, from creating content and publishing to sharing other people’s content and ‘live’ opinions about real-world events. In short ‘real-time’ is re-orientating consumer from creator to distributor and moving the focus to traditional media and professional content. – The open browser-based web is losing out to packaged internet platforms such as mobile apps, internet connected TVs, tablets, e-readers, pc apps, gaming and video platforms. These packaged platforms are re-engineering the internet and destroying the notion of the internet being a singular entity. Crucially for the entertainment revolution, they provide professional media with the means to create sustainable internet business models, something the economics of the browser-based web totally failed to enable. – Professional ‘traditional style’ content is now a core part of the consumer online experience. Internet platforms, for hundreds of millions of consumers, are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice. This is due to continual growth of professional content in video sites (legal and illegal), the rise of ‘real-time’, and the growth of packaged platforms.”
RWW: “The report states that in the new era of social entertainment, traditional media holds the power – a change from the ‘web 2.0′ era, when the user ruled. The report argues that this will lead to a return to passive experiences by consumers. … ‘Professionals are back in the driving seat when it comes to content,’ states the report. This, it says, will lead to the Internet eventually becoming the primary mass entertainment and content delivery platform. – While that is undoubtedly true, it’s difficult to see how the author comes to this conclusion: ‘We as consumers are going back to traditional needs and demands and seeking a more passive experience.’ – The report explains that social entertainment is far more about content sharing, than creation. It goes on to suggest that this ‘light nature of interaction’ is moving the consumer back to the passive state they were in before the Internet came along. Further, that services like Facebook and Twitter turn consumers into ‘distributors.’“
Gerrit Eicker
Time: “The dream of Web 2.0 may be over. If a new report on internet usage is to be believed, social media has turned the internet into more of a passive experience again. … The change, the report suggests, is that social media is more about content sharing than content creation, turning users into passive consumers – or, worse, distributors – of others’ work. … Instead of a shift back towards professional/audience mode, this feels more like a blip as the landscape gets used to its new tools than anything else to me, but what do you think?”
Gerrit Eicker 09:48 on 28. November 2011 Permalink |
Wikipedia: “Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior for a given situation. This effect is prominent in ambiguous social situations where people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior, and is driven by the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation. – The effects of social influence can be seen in the tendency of large groups to conform to choices which may be either correct or mistaken, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as herd behavior. Although social proof reflects a rational motive to take into account the information possessed by others, formal analysis shows that it can cause people to converge too quickly upon a single choice, so that decisions of even large groups of individuals may be grounded in very little information [see information cascades]. – Social proof is a type of conformity. When a person is in a situation where they are unsure of the correct way to behave, they will often look to others for cues concerning the correct behavior. When ‘we conform because we believe that other’s interpretation of an ambiguous situation is more accurate than ours and will help us choose an appropriate course of action,’ it is informational social influence. This is contrasted with normative social influence wherein a person conforms to be liked or accepted by others. – Social proof often leads not just to public compliance [conforming to the behavior of others publicly without necessarily believing it is correct] but private acceptance [conforming out of a genuine belief that others are correct]. Social proof is more powerful when being accurate is more important and when others are perceived as especially knowledgeable.”
TC: “One challenge, which isn’t new, is the battle for consumer attention. If you’re looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users? I’m increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. … If you’re a digital startup, building and highlighting your social proof is the best way for new users to learn about you. And engineering your product to generate social proof, and to be shared through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest and others, can multiply the discovery of your product and its influence. Think of it as building the foundation for massively scalable word-of-mouth. Here’s a ‘teardown’ on various forms of social proof, and how some savvy digital companies are starting to measure its impact. – Expert social proof – Approval from a credible expert, like a magazine or blogger, can have incredible digital influence. … Celebrity social proof – Up to 25% of U.S. TV commercials have used celebrities to great effect, but only a handful of web startups have to date. … User social proof – Direct TV marketers are masters at sharing user success stories. [fascination with this was actually the inspiration for this blog post]. … Wisdom of the crowds social proof – Ray Kroc started using social proof in 1955 by hanging an ‘Over 1 Million Served’ sign at the first McDonald’s. Highlighting popularity or large numbers of users implies ‘a million people can’t be wrong.’ … Wisdom of your friends social proof – Learning from friends thru the social web is likely the killer app of social proof in terms of 1:1 impact, and the potential to grow virally. … In the age of the social web, social proof is the new marketing.”
Cialdini: “Don’t Throw in the Towel: Use Social Influence Research – Take, for example, hotels. Via a card strategically placed in their room, guests in many hotels are urged to reuse their towels to help conserve environmental resources. … Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay. … The result was an almost 47 percent success rate, significantly greater than the cooperation condition. Once again, we see that a relatively minor change, informed by social psychological theory, can serve as a corrective to the existing practices of otherwise astute businesspeople who would never leave themselves comparably uninformed in other arenas of business practice.”