Music, Technology, Art, Economy

"My economic colleagues worked in the building next door, but I had not appreciated the profound..."

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:15:21 -0800

“

My economic colleagues worked in the building next door, but I had not appreciated the profound difference between our intellectual worlds.

To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.

”

- Michael Lewis on the King of Human Error | Culture | Vanity Fair

Michael Lewis quotes Daniel Kahneman in this month’s VF. A more fun-to-read exploration into the psychology of cooperation and motivation than I get from my usual sources…recommended.

The unexpected impact of Facebook’s “seamless sharing” on newspaper sites

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:41:13 -0800

The unexpected impact of Facebook’s “seamless sharing” on newspaper sites :

Interesting analysis, recommended reading (via the FT)

On "Smart Markets"

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:13:00 -0800

(Below is a comment on “Netflix: Leading Indicator on Challenges Ahead for Brands,” by Chris Perry.)

This is such a great post that strings together many of my favorite insights about media, technology, and economics.

I thoroughly agree with the two prescribed steps towards success in a world of “smart markets” (i.e. well-informed customers): research and education.

I’ll add that there is usually a prerequisite to taking those steps, which is to reject a cynical view of “the target market” and acknowledge its newfound power.

Peter Drucker writes in 2002:

“…the center of gravity, and the center of power, will be the customer. In the last thirty years, the center of power has shifted from the supplier, the manufacturer, to the distributor. In the next thirty years, it will certainly shift to the customer – for the simple reason that the customer now has full access to information worldwide.”*

My first thought on how marketing/communications can apply these insights: write for the lowest-common-denominator when you have something new and important (or unexpected) to say.

This does not mean that your 10-K should include scatological humor or that Dane Cook is the ideal corporate spokesperson. It means that simplicity is more important than ever. Even though markets are smarter, most people don’t follow your company’s every decision as closely as an investor or journalist. Brands must anticipate very basic questions about their actions and communicate them as proactively as possible. Formal, abstract language is your enemy. The FAQ is your friend.

A secondary benefit of writing for the lowest-common-denominator is that simpler communications better maintain their integrity. Social media is a giant game of telephone; most information spreads through word-of-mouth and complex messages get out of control quickly purple monkey dishwasher.

“Simpler” is not a new priority but it is more acutely important these days. And it’s also easier said than done. But I agree the challenge can be mitigated with more frequent education to the market. It can only help to have created context when you have something complex to explain.

The second thought I want to share is a perspective on the definition of “connected customer.” This can mean “everyone has a mobile data plan and is connected to the Internet all the time.”

What follows from that, however, is what people are connecting to. Increasingly, they are not connecting to mainstream media or ads. They are connecting to one another via tools like Yelp, Twitter, and Facebook, because peers are more trustworthy.

Which brings me to my last thought: how companies can build more trust. Ultimately, the responsibility for building trust with the market rests with the CEO and senior management (and is expressed by their decisions and results). However, there are some interesting things that marketing and communications can do to support this key priority. Every company has some form of valuable expertise (that’s why it’s a profitable, going concern). Marketers can easily learn how to build trust with the public by contributing this expertise to conversations that are complementary to their sales process.

Michelin famously used this strategy to sell tires. Their guidebooks slowly built up credibility, and — voila — you’re using up more tire tread as you tour the two-star restaurants of Burgundy.

This strategy is even more potent on the web. And any brand can use it as long as the content is properly complementary (i.e. it’s credible). This is basically a content programming issue.

Great post.

—-

*During the previous 30(+) years, the supply-side held more market power because it had access to information about products (cost, performance, dependability, etc) that the customer did not and could not have. More importantly, the customer did not need this information if she could trust the brand (hence the profitability of investing in orthodox branding and advertising…which some argue is decaying rapidly).

Social influence in decision-making: game theory edition

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:39:00 -0700

Long-time and short-time readers alike know that I’ve been studying game theory and how it affects the design of online communities and marcomm strategy.

Part of applying that is learning to be allocentric about allocentricity, meaning: it’s important to understand how people influence each other, so you can better anticipate how people will behave when they’re putting themselves in others’ shoes.

Here’s a pretty little nugget of wisdom from Yochai Benkler’s new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan (page 171):

..the best way to see that self-interest plays a role in decision-making is to go back to the lab. Economists have long operated under the assumption that the higher the stakes, the more the pursuit of self-interest guides our behavior. This turns out to be wrong.

Across countless experiments of the type I’ve been describing, simply raising the stakes did not in fact significantly change the levels of cooperation — even when experimenters went to poorer countries, where they could make the stakes as high as three months’ wages.

What did make a difference in people’s behavior was the relative cost of cooperating. When the relative gain from acting selfishly…compared to the potential payoff for cooperating, was made smaller, more people cooperated.

In other words, in a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, if the payoff when both players cooperated was $4, and the payoff to the defector when one defected and one player cooperated was knocked down to say, $6 instead of $9, fewer people defected.

Logically, that change should not have affected the behavior if one were driven purely by self-interest. You are still better off defecting; $6 is still more than $4.

But that isn’t how the subjects in the experiment saw it. At least some people were willing to behave cooperatively at a personal cost to themselves, as long as the cost was not too high…In other words, our willingness to cooperate is sensitive to the price we have to pay for the privilege of cooperating.

In the real world, one of the day-to-day practices that best exhibit this phenomenon is recycling. In cities with recycling programs, compliance is much higher when the municipalities do curbside pickup rather than requiring residents to take recyclables to some central location.

A couple of weeks ago, I published a blog post about related research from HP Labs, “Social Influence in Recommender Systems”…check it out for more on this subject.

"Despite loving my work, I’ve always hated that question. Ben Casnocha says: Generally, the harder..."

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:15:48 -0700

“

Despite loving my work, I’ve always hated that question.

Ben Casnocha says: Generally, the harder it is to explain to someone you’ve just met at a cocktail party what it is you do on a day to day basis, the more interesting the work you’re engaged in.

”

- “What do you do?” « Jackie Danicki

Love this. +100

"The blog turned out to be a better business, but Mike never claimed to be a journalist."

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:44:29 -0700

“The blog turned out to be a better business, but Mike never claimed to be a journalist.”

- Scripting News: Arrington is the future of what we used to call journalism

Only slightly correct: he claims to be *better* than a journalist. Hence, [merited] controversy.

"In his original design of TED, Wurman sought to strip away some of the conventions of the business..."

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:21:07 -0700

“

In his original design of TED, Wurman sought to strip away some of the conventions of the business conference in an attempt to make things livelier and more engaging.

For instance, he dispensed with the podium: It made it too easy for speakers to read from a script, and, as Wurman puts it, “it made the speaker feel less vulnerable because his or her groin was protected. I wanted them to feel more vulnerable.”

”

- The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again | Co. Design

Pithy, but the really interesting point is here:

With his WWW conference, Wurman intends to supply a challenging premise or question for each pair of speakers to address — but they won’t know what it is in advance. And where they choose go with that topic, or even how long they talk, also will be undetermined. Wurman is hoping that the result will be, in his words, “intellectual jazz.”

Sounds like someone needs to read Gamechangers.

"I once consulted a recruiter on searching for her client company’s name in Google Blogsearch,..."

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:24:43 -0700

“I once consulted a recruiter on searching for her client company’s name in Google Blogsearch, then putting the results feed through Postrank, seeing who wrote about the company and got the most traction. Those were potential recruiting targets.”

- Google Acquires Postrank: A Fork in the Road for the Future of Social Media

Marshall is a creative genius with this stuff. This is the tip of the iceberg of the tools he has…

"Leveraging up 400% in an illiquid investment with no diversification is a scary concept to me and..."

Mon, 16 May 2011 21:45:05 -0700

“Leveraging up 400% in an illiquid investment with no diversification is a scary concept to me and should be to any rational person.”

- JAMES ALTUCHER: Why I Would Rather Shoot Myself In the Head Than Own a Home

"I assume Oracle did this because Open Source projects do everything behind closed doors and the only..."

Fri, 06 May 2011 06:50:18 -0700

“

I assume Oracle did this because Open Source projects do everything behind closed doors and the only way to find out what happened regarding Apache’s inability to get a license from Sun, now owned by Oracle, would be to send a subpoena.

Snort.

That’s like you and me being married, filing joint tax returns, and then in a divorce action, you subpoena me for my tax returns, so you can ask me questions about why they were filed the way they were.

Dude. You were there.

”

- Groklaw - Oracle Ordered to Reduce Claims Against Google From 132 to 3

Abner's Net Net: The Amazing Story of @ReallyVirtual 's unknowing liveblog of the Osama hit

Sun, 01 May 2011 22:52:11 -0700

Abner's Net Net: The Amazing Story of @ReallyVirtual 's unknowing liveblog of the Osama hit:

abnerg:

"TechCrunch’s readers aren’t like New York Times readers; they’re not coming to the..."

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 01:15:16 -0700

“TechCrunch’s readers aren’t like New York Times readers; they’re not coming to the site as conscientious citizens trying to make the world a better place, but as sharks trying to find the angle that will help them make a fortune.”

- Big Tech Blog Says It Has Big Conflicts

Disagree. Most people may say they “don’t trust the media” (see any Pew study) but individual stories are another, uh, story.

(via China v America: how do the two countries compare? | News |...

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:53:40 -0700

(via China v America: how do the two countries compare? | News | guardian.co.uk)

"Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt,..."

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:52:24 -0700

“Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion.”

- n 1: Bad Education

"I’m afraid the Cloud industry tends to oversell it’s capability for reliability somewhat..."

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:18:48 -0700

“I’m afraid the Cloud industry tends to oversell it’s capability for reliability somewhat (what’s .499% between friends - well, about 2 days outage a year actually)”

- Predictable Black Swans in Cloudy Skies - broadstuff

"The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age..."

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:27:11 -0700

“The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age techniques for small companies raising capital.”

- SEC Is Reviewing Small Internet Sales of Stock - WSJ.com

This is without question one of the most exciting developments for anyone interested in institutional, systematic reinvigoration of business and the economy to come to pass in some time.

As the article notes, we are certainly at an early stage of exploration here (regulatory-wise). But as John Hagel noted over two years ago, “We need a new rationale for our biggest private and public sector institutions—to re-imagine them in line with the world around us. Rather than scalable efficiency, we need scalable connectivity, learning, and performance.”

There’s no question that widening the market for equity positions in business ventures can play a role in that re-imagination.

"when there’s loud music and I’m in that environment, it doesn’t matter how tiring my day was with my..."

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:50:20 -0700

“when there’s loud music and I’m in that environment, it doesn’t matter how tiring my day was with my daughter or what kind of mood I’m in, when I go on, a switch just flips in me and I’m 100% awake and focused.””

- The Rub

WORD. Entertaining people and sharing music (simultaneously, professionally) is a unique pleasure.

The Real Housewives of Wall Street | Rolling Stone Politics

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:13:17 -0700

The Real Housewives of Wall Street | Rolling Stone Politics:

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

Worth reading the article…

"if you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO"

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:05:51 -0700

“if you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO”

- What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology.

"Business Wire Chief Information Officer Steve Messick wrote in a recent blog post that advisory..."

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:40:09 -0700

“

Business Wire Chief Information Officer Steve Messick wrote in a recent blog post that advisory releases “impede the information pipeline.”

Ironically, Business Wire used an advisory release to promote Messick’s blog post.

”

- Netflix web earnings release shines amid huge volume | IR Web Report

One of my favorite media-related notes of the last few months.