Scarcity, Value & Social Media

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When everyone is doing it, its no longer a competitive advantage.

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

This passage came from an editorial piece in the Economist that I think is well worth reading. Coming on the heels of my ‘I was wrong’ post I’m going to stick my neck out and wonder if 2012 won’t be the year social media loses a little bit of its rock star status. Now, I’m in no way saying social media is going away or even that it’s going to decline in quality or importance. Only that like the telephone, television and Web it is becoming a simple fact of life, not a novelty, and that the conversations around social media are changing from ‘how do we get into it?’ to ‘now that we’re here, what do we do with it and what can we realistically expect to get from it?’

Here are some reasons I think social media will find itself facing many of the challenges of other communications media in the coming years.

1. The category is maturing.
Like prior media, at some point a shift will happen when we’ll talk less about the medium itself than about the content delivered through it. That’s starting to happen already. Just as few people outside of specialized industry circles discuss the nature of telephony, television or the Web, we’ve been moving away from social media’s dominant self-referential nature. Still, there are people tweeting such obvious thoughts as “This social media stuff is here to stay” (I literally saw this a few days ago, and by a credible social media guru type no less), which means we’ve not quite squeezed out all the juice from the novelty just yet.

2. Burnout.
There’s also the matter of fatigue. Even if you’re not a Tweeting, Tumblr-toting, Foursquare-checking, Instagram-shooting geek, many of us have dedicated quite a bit of our time to tinkering on Facebook et. al. over the last few years. We’ve delighted in the joys of reacquainting with old friends, meeting the occasional new person and voyeuristically peeking into the lives of people we’re connected to.

Operationally, though, these new technologies have a price for individuals, institutions and corporations. They further divide our time, resources, budgets and attention. And of course, as noted above, the fact that they are everywhere, in great quantity, applies downward pressure on their value – both in terms of the quality of any individual piece of content distributed and in the price points companies are willing to pay for services in the sector.

3. Higher consumer expectations.
Social technology has also successfully infiltrated other aspects of life – from seeking recommendations to validating facts to answering questions to making purchases. It can’t be overstated how much social technologies have fundamentally changed these tasks. By the same token, we humans get used to things pretty quick. Once we’re used to them, they become expectations not attractors. When they’re an expectation we don’t talk about them as much – unless they’re broken. Today including social technologies in consumer-facing business practices is becoming table stakes not a competitive advantage.

4. High expectations & Modest Results
Then there are the ridiculously high expectations of social media from an enterprise growth perspective. In addition to the starry-eyed and often nonsensical expectations of venture capitalists hungry to cash in quick; everyone from marketing agencies to operations teams have come to expect social media to be a sledgehammer against barriers to success. This is happening at exactly the same time our habits are settling in and social tools are becoming an expectation of daily life. Anything that is an everyday expectation is unlikely to be a barrier breaker for long.

Certainly businesses have seen some results, and up to now some of those results have outperformed other media by some (usually inherently favorable) measurements. It’s safe to say though that for most, social media has not been the ‘holy grail of marketing’ originally hoped for. Social is becoming but one more arrow in the marketer’s quiver with its strengths and weaknesses. Every company has learned that while they need to be using it, they can’t count on social media to replace all (or any, really) of the other stuff they’re doing. So budgets are divided yet again as the marketing ‘pie’ is sliced smaller and smaller each time popular culture latches onto the next Twitter or FourSquare or Pinterest.

In fact, its recently come to light that many of the problems marketers have always faced remain the same. As it turns out, 83% of a brand Facebook fans never see that brand’s missives - the same clutter issue facing all advertising media. We’re finding that the proportion of ‘fans’ to ‘talking about’ is also pretty modest for most brands – in the same neighborhood as email open rates and coupon redemptions. And whether you get their names from a business reply card, email signup or Facebook ‘like’ – the size of your list is only as useful as your plan to do something with it. The days of racking up 1MM ‘likes’ and claiming victory are over.

The hype cycle revisited
Anyone who lived through the dotcom boom knows that we’ve been here before. New technologies bring high expectations, lofty visions and sometimes crazy business models. Inevitably though, reality sets in. The Economist piece summarized the realization of that reality. A fundamental challenge for social media is the relation between scarcity and value. Social media works against scarcity and thereby against value creation in the traditional economic model sense.

That social media is now a fact of life means that in coming years it will have to work harder to prove itself and it will have to wrestle with the same challenges other media struggle with. Until now social media has enjoyed a near monopoly on the headlines in the media industry space. Moving forward though, share will be about more than just enabling the act of distributing content between friends. For social media it will mean maintaining share – of our time, our attention and our budgets – by proving its comparative value against other media.

iPad Bet Revisited: I was wrong (sort of).

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It’s always been a peculiarity of prediction making that we frequently hear the boasting over accurate guesses but rarely hear of the admission of (more frequent) bad bets. I thought I’d start the New Year (I intended to write this post last week but was distracted) by acknowledging a bad bet in my own blog going back a couple years. Back in October 2009, my longtime friend Brad Kay posted on his blog how he believed the combination of iPad and Bumptop would “forever change the computing experience as we know it”. You can view the exchange on his blog here.

I pounced on the statement for a few reasons. One, those kind of grandiose statements are always suspect to me. They roll off the tongue easily but often without  definition or context. I took issue with Brad’s statement on two fronts:

What does it mean to ‘forever change the computing experience as we know it’?

Change it how? Would we all be using iPads in two years? What percentage of the population needs to own iPads and use them a lot to constitute ‘changing the computing experience as we know it’? The statement sounded suspiciously like ‘paradigm shift’ talk and I found that hard to believe given the two-year event horizon. Paradigms don’t shift, they drift. Change happens slower than our sensationalistic media would lead us to believe.

For what it’s worth, I still stand by this point, but the more important piece is what I wasn’t seeing at the time. That brings me to the second issue I had with Brad’s prognostication.

What is the functional role of the iPad in a world of iPhones, laptops and desktop PCs?

I had trouble understanding what the iPad was going to be used for. Like many other nay-sayers at the time, I was trying to understand where the iPad fit for those of us who had an iPhone and a laptop. In several blog posts I tried to imagine how people would do much of anything productive on the iPad. I argued that most folks would not give up their laptop as a work tool. Conversely, in terms of checking email, visiting Facebook, watching YouTube and tweeting, my iPhone seemed sufficient. Why would I elect to lug around yet another device in my already heavy satchel?

And that’s were I was mistaken. I was assuming two things. First, that it was a zero-sum choice and second that productivity was the driving force behind acquiring an iPad. What I was missing was that the iPad, unlike any device before it, fits in a novel modern need set – one that has never existed before because we didn’t have the surrounding backbone and opportunities to warrant it. That need set is of the small task producer-consumer role we all play in varying degrees. In our multitasking lifestyle we now are rarely ever in a purely consumptive or purely productive mode. Instead we do a little of each which is a relatively new behavior pattern for us. We post to Facebook while watching TV and we check and write emails while reading magazines. We flit from production to consumption and back many times each day as we dart from small task to small task and short burst of content to short burst of content.

The other piece I wasn’t getting at the time was the important role of the app developers in defining the iPad’s utility. The device itself didn’t really need a purpose so long as it was sexy and desirable (it was and is) and the developer community could imagine uses for it. Developers have certainly seen uses of the iPad that I’m sure Apple didn’t anticipate. Instead Apple built the device with hooks that allowed it to crowdsource uses. And unlike tablets in the past which were made with productivity in mind, Apple focused on consumption foremost leaving productivity to the app developers to dream up.

In hindsight, Steve Job’s description of the Pad as ‘magical’ was spot on. With magic, no one knows exactly what’s going to happen. The delight in magic is that it is surprising – exactly the joy the iPad delivers to owners who find uses for it they never expected.

I finally got an iPad2 this year (I skipped the first version) and have fallen in love with it. I use it for simple tasks and simple consumption. It doesn’t replace any other device I have, and I suppose in a pinch it is something I could live without, but it has changed the way I experience computing and I’m guessing it has done so for many other owners too. It isn’t in enough hands to be considered paradigm shifting in my opinion. Once you’re away from urban commuters the sightings of iPads drop precipitously, but its heading in that direction and if prices drop as usual, eventually iPads and their like will find their way into more classrooms, offices and homes.

So while today tablets are a long way from being the dominant form factor for digital experience, they are a consideration on the minds of anyone making anything in the digital space from new products, to new marketing, to new tools, to new operational procedures in business, to new entertainment distribution systems, and on and on and on. In that sense, its influence is certainly changing the computing experience as we know it.

So Brad Kay, I owe you a beer. You were right.

That said, the other half of your prediction – that Bumptop thing – not as much traction on that front. Maybe we can buy each other a beer?

The conundrum of responsive design.

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I remember when Netscape launched its frames tag. I remember how it blew my mind. I immediately tapped out some code that nested frames in themselves rendering a vortex M.C, Escher would’ve been proud of.

I also remember how frames collided with the classical design training I’d received. As did the notion of setting a table width parameter at some percentage, or even better simply ‘*’ to fill the gap depending on the browser’s width.

These were the earliest precursors to a unique problem facing the digital interface designer.

The Golden Ratio does not apply here.
When I began taking drawing and painting in high school and college I spent a lot of time studying laws of composition – from the effects of visual symmetry to the almighty Golden Ratio. An underlying assumption beneath all of it was that as an artist you had full control of your canvas. You chose the width and it was finite and fully contained and would not change. Early on, digital design began to wreak a certain havoc on this fundamental premise.

As digital media have evolved more and more control has been taken away. For the print designer converting to digital in the late 1990′s, it was a shock that the right and bottom edge of the browser ‘canvas’ could change outside of your control. Browsers also rendered code differently, monitors came in different sizes and resolutions. Way back when even certain colors were unavailable. Time passed and the technology progressed. With the move from static page (hard coded HTML) to data driven websites compiled on the fly, designers lost even more control over the consistency with which their choices would render across a userbase. Current best practices in SEO, social media, etc. exacerbate this issue still more today.

Where in print the designer has near 100% control over the rendering of the piece (last minute, crazy client requests, noted) in digital the capacity to define how a page renders is shared between multiple parties and systems. Suddenly the computer science concept of graceful degradation became a part of the problem the designer was tasked to solve for.

Convergent Pipe. Divergent Media.
Now we are embarking on an age where responsive design (the term isn’t even in wikipedia yet!) will likely move to the forefront of the digital designer’s mind. While pundits will say with great certainty that media are converging, I would argue the opposite. Media are diverging. If television, radio, magazines and outdoor are considered ‘media types’, then we today have far more media types than even a few decades ago. Today ‘online media’ is a misnomer as there are a multitude of types. I don’t know about you, but I own an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop and a Kindle. Many of my peers do too.

What has converged is the pipeline, not the media. The internet now feeds all of these screens (and increasingly the television, radio and even billboards). It is a common infrastructure underneath a variety of diverging media types. When you experience digital content, you tap into this pipeline with one of a multitude of devices that interpret and render that content as appropriate to the form factor of the device.

Content producers – from publishers to advertisers – have continually struggled to chase after the functional requirements across all these screens. Where once you’d publish to a single format, now your content is served digitally and needs to be viewable across a range of devices, each with their own rules and characteristics. Responsive design seeks to solve this problem with a technological efficiency. Rather than creating a separate experience for mobile, tablet, laptop and TV, responsive design uses code to identify a device and respond to it by serving up the best rendering for the nature of that device.

Interestingly, this very complex problem is being solved with simplicity.

Is keep it simple, stupid (or smart)?
I remember reading years ago Marc Cuban’s post on the Internet becoming more boring and his perspective has stuck with me since (though I don’t entirely agree with it). Borrowing from his premise, it could be argued that the increasing requirements of our data-driven, socially-enabled, multiple ‘last mile’ devices, environment is forcing certain commonalities on digital experience design. Could this, combined with general usability best practices which are predicated on a level of intuitive familiarity and therefore some degree of standardization, be painting us into a corner aesthetically?

At this time I want to clearly stipulate that there is still great diversity in the needs and outcomes within the broad spectrum of digital media. This is not to say all sites are starting to look the same. That said, I do think there are some strong arguments to be made that certain broad formats have arisen which many sites are adapting to out ofnecessity. I might typify some these as the information portal (e.g. a Google, Yahoo, or CNN.com style layout), the blog construct (used for sites primarily focused on publishing information) and the social network framework (profile handling, media sharing, rating and reviewing). There is certainly cross over as well. What each of the above has in common though is a lighter reliance on interwoven graphical elements. More and more the elements of design are moving away from ‘hard coded’ graphics (jpgs, pngs, etc.) and more to those elements that are rendered by parameters entered with code commands (e.g. CSS styles, system-rendered text).

Responsive design places a higher premium on the generous use of system rendered elements and a reduced use of hard graphics. When hard graphics are used, responsive systems mandate that they need to be considered in a variety of configurations and scalable sizes such that they can morph to meet a 320px width or a 1440px width or greater. Likewise copy is best rendered in system text – with its designer-averse limited number font options – such that is rags dynamically. Even the once locked-down ‘navigation bar’ now needs to be thought about in multiple configurations.

That, my friends, is a lot to keep in mind when doing a GUI design. It seems logical then that most responsive design is very open and minimalist. The fewer elements to juggle the greater likelihood of achieving a pleasant aesthetic balance across multiple configurations. That’s the up side. The downside is an increasing likelihood that sites will begin to look more and more alike over time as ‘best practices’ funnel most design solutions into a common suite of tools and tactics.

So in having to increasingly keep it simple, are we in effect dumbing down digital design? Maybe.

But maybe the highest order of usability design is coming to the foreground now precisely because of responsive design.

Looking ahead through print and television.
Among some UX professionals there is belief that a GUI – be it mobile, tablet or browser, should not call attention to itself. The role of the UX designer in this school of thought is to facilitate an experience with minimal distraction by the navigational system being used to do so. In this sense the GUI is the wrapper around content – whether that content is video, static images, sound, touch-responsive activity, a game, or even a passage of text. The site itself is not the art but rather the mat and frame through which the art is presented.

If UX design evolves in this manner, that too will fly in the face of traditional design. Graphic designers who work in traditional media like print and packaging treat every word and element – from the legal copy and nutrition information to the headlines and images – as a part of the final art. What navigation there is in a printed piece (the binding perhaps) is often, though not always, outside the designer’s primary area of interest. Similarly, a bag, box or jar is navigable through its folds and tabs but the package designer tends to work around these elements, not with them (most, though not all of the time).

With radio and television, the first media to contain content changed or disappeared with time, the navigation (turning the dial or clicking the remote) remained distinctly detached from the actual content (the music or TV show). Radio and TV program producers didn’t have to think about the dial used to change channels (except to be interesting enough to keep people from reaching for it). The mechanical navigational systems of televisions and radios were instead given treatment by industrial product designers whose objectives were of usability and style but not communication of content.

Navigation within navigation.
With digital media served on screen bearing devices the lines get blurry. In some ways even redundant. Today’s physical digital device has its own mechanical navigational system (power and volume buttons, etc.). Within its screen is housed a content distributing intermediary (the site or app) with a navigational system of its own. No wonder older people find computers much more difficult to use than televisions. There is twice the navigation to learn.

In this light it is obvious that companies like Apple are trying to evolve past this redundancy. The iconic iPod spinner (and the mouse before it) was an attempt to solve this by simultaneously addressing the mechanical and digital navigation with a single interface. Today Apple is trying to remove as much mechanical navigation as possible as witnessed by its “one button” iPhone and iPads.

Interactive design has until now had two navigational masters, that of the mechanical device and the GUI. Today’s touch-screen systems and simplified physical devices are now pushing the burden of navigation squarely into the digital GUI. Where a TV has a remote which is distinct and separate from the content, the interactive experience nests the navigation very close to the content. This may be why designers have struggled to decide whether or not the navigation is part of the designed content or the container, much like a TV’s channel dial once was.

It would seem that responsive design, if it continues to gain momentum, will begin to force that hand. With responsive design the best navigation is the most simple, fluid, flexible and out-of-the-way. This is contrary to the traditional designer’s goal of styling it to the same degree as the content. This means that the digital GUI, like the mechanical device navigation of TV sets and radios back in the day, will increasingly be under pressure to disappear into the background while the content – a served video, uploaded image, shared post or installed game – will be the focus of the experience.

I am inclined to believe that market forces (cost efficiencies), an increasing reliance on data, and technological innovation (new device form factors) will exert significant pressure toward the adoption of responsive design principles.

How designers address the conflicting agenda inherent in responsive design (simple, intuitive, undisruptive usability) with the commercial needs of content publication and its reliance on differentiation and novelty to garner attention remains to be seen.

Social Media and the big browser bias.

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It’s easy to think everyone in the world shares certain experiences. When we hear 800MM people use Facebook we can easily assume they use it just like we do – opening their laptops at work or tapping into a tablet computer. The social media revolution we’re steeped in seems to be happening all around us and the media go to great lengths to remind us of just how much everything is changing.

Occasionally though, we come across a piece of information that calls this into question.

This article on the ‘digital divide’ was pretty interesting reading. The data from the Department of Commerce is in some ways hard to believe given the seeming ubiquity of all things digital.  For example, only 40% of households with an HHI under $25K have wired Internet access in their homes. Now, you may say those are America’s poor, so its not surprising. True, but what about one of America’s fastest-growing market segments? A segment with over $1 Trillion in buying power today which is expected to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013. Of this highly desirable and rapidly growing market group only 57% of households have wired Internet access. They are the Hispanic American population and they show up on many marketing briefs today. Similarly, of the African American population only 55% have wired access to their home.

When you consider all the hubbub being made about engaging Twitter’s 20MM or so regular U.S. users, the following market segments are worth reflecting on: Today there are 17.5MM African American people and 21MM Hispanic people accessing the Internet primarily via mobile devices.

Internet usage, including Facebook usage, is very different on a mobile device. Mobile websites are far simpler, often little more than navigation, text, images and the occasional video clip. Standard websites, viewed through a mobile browser are arguably even less engaging. They usually require a lot of pinching and pulling to make a page anywhere near legible. Oh, and filling out forms on a 320px wide screen if not especially gratifying. Even Facebook’s smartphone app pares down the experience for mobile by stripping out the custom pages from brand sites and reducing the experience to a wall, info page and photo gallery. That of course is for the 40% of cell phone users have smart phones anyhow. The other 60% on feature phones, more or less miss out altogether.

Those of us working in the digital media space tend to have smart phones and very likely tablet devices too. We tend to use laptops or have big display monitors at our work stations. Our homes tend to have wireless broadband connections too. And because we work this way, its easy to forget there are significant portions of the population who don’t. If we do forget, we can also neglect to address the unique environment these people are experiencing digital content in.

With budgets tight and time also short, its easy to focus on the big browser experience and leave the small screen an afterthought. Yet for some businesses, this can mean leaving a trillion dollar market segment unattended to.