I’ve been “fiddling” (as I do) with Empire Avenue and Klout lately. These are two very different attempts at measuring a person’s online influence and authority. If I’m not careful I can spend up to 30 minutes a day on Empire Avenue and I check my Klout most days.

Empire Avenue is far more elaborate than Klout, in may ways. It’s a deeply “gamified” experience, where you are given all kinds of things to do to increase your share price and wealth, to interact with others, and to, well, waste lots of time.

But standing back from these two services, and others like them, I am conscious of another much bigger opportunity for someone big. Think… Facebook big, or Google big. I’m thinking about the gamification of the entire social web.

Can you imagine it? In the not too distant future (a future that is approaching us at “internet speed”), pretty much everything you do online will be measured and will be intelligently ranked against pretty much everything everyone else does online, to give you a very detailed influence/authority score.

Presently, systems like Klout, Peer Index and Empire Avenue are very limited. They give us only the slimmest idea of what’s coming. They are limited to measuring you on a pathetically small handful of services: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and the like. The limitations of this should be obvious.

If you’re the most influential book reviewer on Amazon, none of these ranking services can see any of that. If you’re the most authoritative contributor to a large niche discussion forum on, say, day trading… none of these ranking services can see any of that either.

To suggest that Klout, Empire Avenue, Peer Index or the like can hope to give you a fair and comprehensive ranking is a nonsense. There are only three kinds of people who rank highly on them now: celebrities, social media professionals (who spend all day online and are “strategically prolific” in talking amongst themselves) and hackers – people like me who write and deploy scripts and other trickery to generate “activity” to make us look bigger and more awesome than we may actually be.

It’s also a fundamental flaw of these systems – in claiming to offer a single-digit representation of a person’s social media influence and authority – that they see the social media world as one homogenous “cosmos”. I may be Justin Bieber with a perfect score of 100/100 on Klout, but that doesn’t mean I’m in any way valuable to that huge and lively forum of day traders. I’m a total zero over there.

So what’s the end game here? What needs to happen? What do I think WILL happen?

Firstly, I think this is fundamentally a Very Big Data opportunity. So that means Google, Facebook or Microsoft. It’s only these sorts of monster internet businesses who can possibly hope to track your every move online. Google pretty much already does, but has a track-record of doing search+advertising sales brilliantly and pretty much everything else averagely. Microsoft does nothing really well outside of the enterprise or the desktop, so that leaves Facebook, who are very slow about extending outside their own domain name.

If I think Google is still a good chance it’s because their analytics product is almost everywhere, so they’re already tracking more online activity across websites, at least, than anyone else.

See, I think the big game here is about your identity! The winner is the company which can come out owning your identity online. That means: knowing more about you than anyone else, tracking where you go and what you do better than anyone else, and paying others for that information handsomely.

And no company is going to achieve that without giving you an enjoyable, rewarding, engaging experience, in the context of which you will be happy to stay loyal to them, to give them all your gory details, etc.

But for this winner to emerge, more than anything else, they are going to have to collect comprehensive information on your online activities. And as Facebook’s latest announcements make clear, there will need to be a lot better data collected on you than ever before.

Right now Facebook is transitioning from a service which allowed you to “like” or “recommend” things, to a service which waits to see what you actually do. It makes sense that Alister Cameron buying a book on Amazon is a more accurate indication of his interest in that book than Alister Cameron’s “liking” of that book.

The best data to collect reflects what you do, moreso than what you say you like. And so it is that Facebook is “democratizing verbs”, so that in the near future your Facebook timeline will record that you read an article, bought an event ticket, donated money, rated someone’s comment on a blog, etc.

As the guys over at Badgeville are putting it, your “behaviour graph” is in every way more important than your “interest graph”. That’s where social media reputation scoring is going.

But if we know what data we’re trying to track, we still have a fundamental problem: comprehensiveness. Badgeville is developing a fantastic product called Social Fabric. But it’s for an individual site to implement for their own user base… only. We’re back to the same problem we identified earlier. There’s no one doing the two critical elements of this: tracking what everyone actually does online, and building game mechanics around that to provide incentives, rewards, and recognition for it. And finally, no one has figured out how to do this in such a way that a given person’s specific expertise is surfaced and rewarded, based on what they’ve actually done, rather than on what they or others say about them. But that’s all coming…

These are some initial thoughts. I need to develop them a lot further, but I’m at least certain of this: that there is enormous money to be made out of the kinds of data to be collected from what you and I actually do online, and there is definitely a way to make it so that the gameplay follows you around online, pretty much wherever you go. And that you have massive fun with it!

Can you imagine that? Does what I’m describing make sense to you?

 

This year at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Google came up with a doozie of a good one for their Android operating system. In fact, a few good ones. Dissecting the Android approach to driving traffic to their stand is fascinating. So I thought I’d unpack that a little, both because it’s fun and because it gives us a little insight into why Google are so consistently great at what they do.

It’s also glaringly obvious that Android was orders of magnitude better promoted than Windows 7. Microsoft were not invisible, but they were comprehensively outdone by Google this time round.

Little Green Men

The first and most formidable promotional idea — one that got me and my girlfriend totally hooked — was the little Android badges. These were given to all Android “partners” to give out at their respective stands. There were about 20 partners scattered all around the congress site, and it meant a lot of walking to go see them all. They were easy to identify, however, with a prominently displayed Android “man” — about a foot tall (see second picture below) — holding a bowl full of the badges.

Now, these were not dicky little plastic badges, but solid metal with brightly coloured resiny designs on the front (see first picture below). So they looked good, stood out when pinned to someone’s lapel, and they drew attraction to themselves, not least for their bold “Android green” colour. They started appearing on Day 1 of the event, and we soon cottoned on to the fact that you were supposed to go collect them all. In total there were 86 different ones to collect, and they all looked cool!

To cut a long story short I ended up with close to 40 of them. The larger stand holders got new badges every day, and the Android stand itself would regularly offer a “special”, such as a Valentine’s Day one with a little red heart on the first day. Unaware of how the “game” was played that early in the event, we missed out on that badge, and we’re not happy!

As my badges collected on the seatbelt-style strap of my computer bag, people would stop me and ask about them or be seen laughing to each other about them as I passed by. And as most people worked out that badge collecting was fun to do, it all started to look like a feeding frenzy every morning when new badges were on offer. Some stall holders were clearly getting tired of the “nuisance calls” from people like me.

But don’t miss the point: you couldn’t miss the little green men! They were everywhere. All kinds of people — whether Android partners or not — were wearing little Android pins on their clothing or bags. Android was impossible to miss, and Android was getting talked about.

The Android Stand

In branding colour matters. And so it was that the Android stand was awash with the particular lime green of the Android logo. Now, the little mascot is a short R2D2-style character and he was everywhere too. There were figurines to put on table-tops, human-sized ones, animated ones on the big screen rising above the stand, and a huge one that was actually the roof and exterior of a smoothie stand. Free smoothies!

The Android stand was at least the size of a basketball court, and interestingly enough, not as big as a number of other stalls at MWC, but abuzz with activity constantly. Visitors and Android app creators milled around presentation stands, playing with devices and making a lot of noise. All app partners were dressed in t-shirts, reinforcing the brand consistently.

The Free Stuff is the Good Stuff

One thing that’s always been a part of Google culture, as I understand it, is “free”. They’re pretty generous to their staff and they have a habit of buying a company that sold a given product and then giving that same thing out for free. Think Urchin, say.

So “free” was the deal at MWC too. From free Android pins, to free smoothies (and yes, they were yummy!), to free bottles of water by the self-serve fridge-full, to a free “Mini Me” creator where you could stand at a tablet and use a custom app to design an Android version of yourself. I’ve included an example in the gallery below.

Now free’s great but even better is free and fun. And last I checked, a badge “hunt” is fun; free smoothies are fun; a Mini Me creation app (and free print-outs) is fun. And in case you were still looking for more, they even had a slide (picture below), where you could slither down from the upper balcony to the ground level on a kids’ playground slide and there would be a free photo of you embarrassing yourself waiting at the counter within minutes. Yes, I gave that a go too.

How Not to Do it

It’s instructive to compare what Android did to what most other stand-holders did. Most all of them gave something away from free, but it was a product brochure. Yawn. Or it was one of the lowest-common-denominators of “schwag” like branded pens or keyrings. Double yawn. If you were hungry, every second stand offered free nibblies, and they were almost all the same — micro pastries or boiled lollies. Snore.

Most of the major brands and manufacturers went to great lengths to create impressive stands and product displays, but the impression they mostly gave was one of sterility and professionalism: lots of shiny stuff, bright lights and polished surfaces. Lots of sterile tech bling. By comparison the Android stand had moreso the feel of a fun house. And the fun was in the detail. I mean, consider this: the smoothie stand put two green straws in each smoothie cup, facing away from each other, to match the antennae of the Android logo. Simple but both smart and… fun!

So what was the difference? Innovative thinking, bold thinking and doing something free, fun and different! It really reminded me of how lazy so many companies were, in terms of thinking through their strategy of in-event promotions. One thing the Android people really understood (and no doubt paid for) was that you can find ways to promote yourself that extend outside the perimeter of your allocated stand space. Of course, posters and such will do it, but people do it better. No, not scantily clad girls on roller skates, but Joe Average event participant who’s been compelled to join in your “free fun” and is virally infecting others with it. Think about it.

What are the Take Aways for You?

By most people’s standards, Google is a mega-wealthy company. But don’t think that’s why they did better with their Android stand than everyone else at the show. I don’t think it was the money. I think it was a disciplined approach to having better ideas than everyone else. I think it comes back to Google’s core value of rigorous ideation. I mean, what does it cost to exhaustively and creatively brainstorm an idea with a room full of highly talented and skilled people?

Do not be intimidated by this! No matter your company size or your event budget, for goodness sake, make the time to get your best minds together and hammer out the ideas. Developed a disciplined approach to brainstorming, and value ideation and creative thinking. If you make that process fun then you stand a chance of coming up with some fun strategies too! It stands to reason, doesn’t it?

The Android stand scored the most on the “fun scale” because Google as a company values fun more than others did! It’s a values thing. The Android stand was best promoted at MWC because Google as a company works the hardest to come up with the ideas — many months out from the event. And it’s not a budget or manpower thing… it’s a values thing!

Photo Gallery

Click the thumbnails below for bigger versions…