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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?

Facebook brings social (media) Darwinism to brand pages

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As a pragmatist it was with great joy that I read of Facebook’s new metrics for brand pages. Hailed as giving brands new tools to measure engagement and word of mouth, I think these new metrics will be game changing in the Thunderdome of marketing.

Among the new batch of stats are a few sizzly big number metrics to make myopic brand managers dewey eyed. Measures like ‘friends of fans’will have some folks salivating at the huge aggregate numbers of people that *could* be reached. That’s been social media’s big selling point for the past three years – the potential of the cumulative network effect – and no doubt it will continue to sell. Plus, these new numbers will make it personal – now your brand will be able to see its very own potential Facebook reach.

But the really useful numbers, in my opinion, lie outside the big potential reach values and are the ones that help contextualize measurements like fan counts.

Up until now trying to get a bead on what ‘engagement’really means has been tricky. While terms such as ‘like’, ‘fan’and ‘follow’imply a certain level of conscious attention toward the liked/fanned/followed brand, there’s been scant real proof as to just how active those fans really are.

Facebook is starting to change that.

They like you, but do they really like you?
Soon a brand will be able to look at the proportion of its ‘fans’who actually talk about and share the pages and content they’ve ‘liked’. They’ll be able to see the “weekly total reach” too, which will help indicate how many people (and news channels) spread the brand’s content across those delicious networks of potential reach.

These new metrics will be helpful in contextualizing the actual engagement of one’s fan count. For example, one very well-fanned Facebook page had wall postings averaging 4000-7000 ‘likes’. At first blush, that sounds awesome. Then I looked and saw they have 22MM ‘fans’. Taken as a proportion of the overall fanbase, that’s a response rate of three hundredths of a percent. By contrast email open rates seem to hover in the area of at least single percentage points (more here, and here too). Even FSI’s seem to score in a similar neighborhood (also, here) in terms of their redemption rates.

Now, before you get all disgruntled and start calling me a hater, I am not saying social media don’t work. Far from it. Social media are extremely powerful. More direct and intimate than any other media channel today.

I am also acknowledging that comparing comments on a wall post to FSI redemption rates is apples-to-oranges. The point is not the percentages. I am simply calling attention to the fact that that social media statistics are often served up without context. When context is provided – as above – it can at least give us reason to stop and think. (And that is never a bad thing.)

Yes, yes, I agree that using social media is not all about getting ‘likes’and comments to posts. And yes, it’s true, you might be getting a lot of impressions with those posts and may be building some good brand perceptions along the way. All of this is very important and should not be dismissed.

But a big premise of social media is ‘engagement’and ‘earned impressions’. As noted before, social media has been selling against these terms since its commercialization. But ‘engagement’implies people DOING SOMETHING, not just observing a wall post as they would a banner ad. You can’t call yourself an engagement medium and then measure yourself by impressions and perception building alone. Social media is growing up, it’s time to ditch the kid gloves and raise our expectations.

Asking better from brands and agencies.
Facebook is raising the bar and doing so in a way that is truly authentic to the spirit of social media – right out in the open for everyone to see and share. By including the “people talking about” metric in public view, right on a brand’s page, visitors and page administrators alike will know whether the page is popular. That’s dropping the glove in a big way. No more can brands quickly claim victory simply by accruing six figure fan bases. A quarter of a million fans won’t matter as much if right below that head count is another number saying that only a few are bothering to talk about the page and its contents.

Moving forward, engagement will move from theory to practice and agencies and brands are going to have to do something to earn the attention and interaction of Facebook fans. The numbers won’t let us hide behind vapid claims.

Facebook has issued a challenge and client and agency will have to work together to be truly remarkable now. It’s a brilliant move on Facebook’s part (they’re on a roll) because they’re essentially guaranteeing their advertising partners will have to up their game and provide a better Facebook experience.

In some ways, it will be survival of the fittest. Then again, as my college mentor once said, “Nothing motivates like the fear of extinction.”

Outposting & Irrational Exuberance

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Staking a parcel of land in a new digital space is easy. It can lead to big sexy headlines and snap-judgement misassumptions.

Mashable wasted no time last week noting that Google+ has ‘signed up 13% of the U.S. population‘ and could be larger than LinkedIn or Twitter within a year.

Exciting news to be sure. And in some ways, given Google’s reach with its search service, etc. not surprising. I question the prediction though. Via an admittedly unscientific survey across my own Google+ circles I see a lot of outposting going on.

I define outposting as the rushing out to stake a claim to a new site or service online without intention to actively engage with it immediately. Outposting is done to reserve our account name. To be seen there. And to take a peek to see what all the noise is about. The rewards for outposting are well known. Having your name locked up – especially if its John Smith or similar – has a certain first-mover cache and is good for those concerned with their personal brand. Outposting is also a little like investing a small amount in a stock on the chance it gets big someday. Plus, as with many things online, the actual investment made in outposting is pretty small – about 10 minutes of your time – so why wouldn’t you?

I’d casually estimate that 20-25% of the people in my circles on G+ haven’t posted anything yet beyond the bare minimum profile and maybe a test quip or two. Additionally, the vast majority of people who have posted regularly work in media, marketing or technology or are otherwise of your typical early adopter profile. This is fine, and niching in natural in a fragmented media environment, but it should cast a certain light on stats like “G+ could be larger than LinkedIn by next year”. G+ might give Twitter a run for its money – it’s currently appealing to the same market segment – but when I think of all the kinds of people I know on LinkedIn vs. G+, Google still has some distance to go before it has proven its appeal to the broader LinkedIn segment. (The utility of Google+ competing with LinkedIn is also highly suspect at this point.)

Outposting reminds me of the Oklahoma land run scene from the Tom Cruise film Far And Away
(I found the clip and inserted it below) where they rush out onto the frontier and jam a flag in a piece of land. In the film, it was literally a dash to stick a flag in a parcel of land surrounded by equally open, full-of-potential, land. As anyone who follows history knows, some of that land grew to become towns and eventually cities. Some became farmland. And some never became anything at all. It had something to do with the land itself, but more to do with what was being done on neighboring plots around any specific parcel.

That last part is important because the eventual settling and development of G+ will work in a similar way. What the settlers around us do with their piece will largely define if the piece we staked out will be useful and valuable to us.

I am guessing that behind Google+ rapid signup rate, there is a lot of outposting going on. Who wouldn’t take 10 minutes to claim their parcel of this brave new world? The question remains how many of these people will be true frontier settlers willing to pull up stakes and move their stuff from the comfort of Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever to the open frontier of G+.

Then again, maybe it won’t be an either/or but rather like having a summer cottage you visit occasionally. (I realize I am stretching the analogy here.) Many of us already have multiple accounts on multiple sites and visit each for different reasons. This is all well and good, but one place is always our primary residence and as anyone with summer property knows, maintenance of the place you don’t go to frequently can be difficult to keep consistently. And if maintenance drops the face of neighborhood starts to change. Timely updates are the fresh paint and manicuring of Internet land ownership. (Wow, I am beating this analogy to death aren’t I?)

It’s worthing pausing now to consider Twitter as there are some parallels. According to Edison Research, Twitter enjoys 92% awareness among Americans. This is not surprising given that the little blue bird appears on everything from T-shirts to billboards and on the vast majority of websites. However, despite this awareness, which is nearly equal to Facebook’s, regular users of Twitter represent just 11% of the population. A far cry from Facebook’s nearly half of our population.

Twitter’s rocketing growth made headlines just as G+ is today. Publishers spoke of ’100% growth rates’etc. without detailing the circumstances surrounding those statistics. As it turns out, 22.5% of Twitter users publish 90% of tweets and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. (Think about that… 22.5% of 21% represent 90% of all Tweets. That’s the 80-20 rule on steroids.) So while a ’100% growth rate’is a great stat for headlines, there’s a lot of outposting hidden in there as well as simple old-fashioned account abandonment and user atrophy.

Google+, at this point seems to be echoing Twitter’s general trajectory just as Foursquare did a few years ago. Admittedly, G+ probably has higher odds of pulling in more of the masses if only because more of the masses use Google tools and brand awareness and trust is very high. No one needs to learn what Google is or stands for. We all have our idea.

(Playing devil’s advocate though, even with 92% awareness, Twitter hasn’t demonstrated enough utility to enough people to enjoy higher usage.)

Lest I sound like a buzzkill, it’s worth noting here too that having 11% of the U.S. population active on your site (as Twitter does) is not shabby at all. In my opinion its not quite enough market share to warrant the lofty Wall St. valuations, but then again, Wall St. has had a bad week so I’ll be nice to them for now. Instead, 11% marketshare is sort of the equivalent of being one of the ‘big four’networks of our time – though with Twitter that network is more akin to the Syfy channel and E! combining audience than a general household demographic. (Also, its worth stating here that the dynamics of social networking tools are so different from TV networks that the comparison and utility of being the equivalent of a ‘big four network’basically ends with the simple quantitative similarity).

I guess my big point here is that I think we working in media, marketing and communications need to check ourselves against irrational exuberance associated with outposting. Outposting is a well-established phenomenon that drives great headline writing and creates really impressive growth charts in meetings. It is not, though, a guarantee of future returns.

Funny, that last sentence sounded like the disclaimer that shows up on financial statements. And finance, as witnessed by this week’s remarkable stock market plunge, is another category full of hyperbole and ‘surprising’disappointments.

Interesting.