It most industries I have encountered, advertisers lie.  This is obvious to most and the distrust bread in the general public is now at a point where I believe most people have stopped believing what advertising says to us.  When the celebrity comes on to our screens and smiles showing us, ‘you can look just like me’ an uneven false image is created.   You can’t hope to look like them.  Yet advertisers build their campaigns around a deep down truth that is a lie we tell ourselves.  Things such as:

You can look younger by using skin cream

You can improve you health by drinking this

Take these pills and you will lose weight fast with no side effects

And so on and so on. Why do we buy these lies?  Even television channels do this by piquing our interest with clever editing in the commercials.  They place a well-crafted lie in a commercial and we accept it… or do we?  I think we know it’s false and realise the lie but buy things in hope.  We don’t believe false advertising with our minds, we believe them with our actions, often against our better judgement.

I think this is kind of theatre we have grown accustomed to and expect.  Take for example the following advertisement:

In a strange way Cadbury are selling chocolate by way of entertainment.  A marketing guru I saw on the Gruen Transfer argued that chocolate sales went up as a result of that ad.  I would say it this way: Interest was piqued in chocolate because of that ad and people remembered why they liked it and went and bought it.  I don’t think you need to advertise to sell chocolate, just sell it at a reasonable price and people will buy it and this is the point isn’t it?

What Advertising people do so well is play with our Engagement, the way we think and act in social settings.  Engagement is a word I have used to talk about how people think and how that influences the way they act.  Advertising plays on both.  If I was being a pragmatic philosopher I would say, ‘thinking is acting’.  That is, advertisers make us think and because that influences our behaviour.  That’s no surprise but what is: they deceive us to do it.   For my final example, I will use real estate advertising.

Real Estate is a controversial area.  So many people have been ‘ripped’ off by agents in one way or another.  Yet, the way a house is sold relies explicitly on the honesty of the buyer and the real estate agent.  My father in law told me how he recently pulled out of buying a house simply because the building inspection came back as showing evidence of termites.  In Australia, especially Brisbane, this is a big deal.  It can mean you have massive damage to the structure of the house and you will be up for thousands of dollars in repair bills.   He had built into the contract that subject to a building inspection, he wouldn’t purchase the house.   So he didn’t.  He lost his deposit and recent reports show that the same house has been resold twice in three years.  All that pain could have been avoided if an honest approach prevailed.  Yet, you can’t sell a house unless you lie… right?

Putting aside all arguments about ethics, integrity and character, there is another pragmatic issue for advertisers here that needs thinking about.  That is, the issue of how to sell things in an economy where attention is the scarcity.  Does that mean more dishonesty should come in so we pay attention?  Are we really to believe the claims of real-estate agents?  I think not.  Yet, these are the social connections we have forged.  It doesn’t mean every real estate agent is a liar or a cheat.  Of course not.  But, which one that you know would happily point out the termites in a building and say, ‘hey check this out, there’s a huge problem that’s going to cost you thousands of dollars.’  It’s ‘buyer beware’ because that’s the society we live in and that’s what we expect.  So it is in advertising, we know it’s pretend so we go along with so-called false advertising and accept it because we know we are being lied. It’s a social contract.

The question is: why have we come to accept it?

Often we say when we are making decisions that we need ‘more’ information.  As Clay Shirky said in something I watched once: it’s not about more information, it’s about better filtering.  I think it’s about better perspectives, ideas and concepts.  Yes that probably is more information but it’s filtered, tailored and well suited to your problem.  Sometimes more information leads to confusion and this isn’t helpful.

What then?

More perspectives?  How about better ideas?  Why keep digging the metaphorical hole in the same place… try something else.  Get somebody from outside the problem to come in and have a look.  Quite often they will frame it in way you don’t expect.  Sometimes we are coming from the completely wrong angle… this isn’t at all helpful either.

In the long run I suppose it would be easier to say that having more information would justify the amount of weight we put on the top of a organisation.  Ultimately though, most of the time, better ideas will do.  Wherever you can find them.

‘I believe in free will I can do what I want.’

VS.

‘I believe in FATE everything is predetermined.’

For the record I don’t know what I believe.  Back to the post.  How can you ever resolve this?  You can’t.  It’s a bipolar idea.  It has one side which is a the down side and one which is the upside.  Do you know what these ideas have in common?  They are based on an assumption/assessment of the future.  Yet there is a connection here.  If these people both went about their lives something would happen… something magical.  They would eventually die and at some point they are likely to pay tax.   Yet they would never report the event in the same way:  It’s God’s will that I pay tax, I choose to pay tax.  It’s God’s plan that I die, I die because I choose to keep living.  Both ways of thinking are different yet can never be proven outside the frame of human thought.  Why?  Because, they are bipolar ideas.  If one says the sun is up, the other says it’s down.

Here’s a third option

Try another idea.  Why not say somethings are predetermined others are not, because I choose.  Or let’s just do away with the whole stupid bipolar idea in the first place and say it this way: I have no idea.  I pay tax because I don’t want to go to jail and I die because life stops at some point.  No big deal.  It’s just the way it has to be because I choose to pay tax.    Or because I can’t cheat death I choose to keep living until I expire.  The predetermined has now become my choice, even though it’s not a choice at all.

Breaking your brain?

Maybe.  But remember it’s only an idea and that’s all it could be ever ever ever.  Why?  I don’t know why it’s just what I believe.  An idea only has the power to convey the abstract long enough until the reality of life hammers it out.  Yet, I won’t know that a turtle rules world as suggested by some religions and Stephen King until I die.  Even then I may never find out.  It may be black and I will be alone.  I still believe in Ghosts.

Is there more than one answer?

To Bipolar ideas?  No.  They are the same idea but looked at from two different points of view at once.   Not all ideas are bipolar some tripolar some have no polar, others are simply unanswerable.   Some ideas though have a special quality in that they are the same idea but because they are dealing with a difficult concept you can actually see them two ways at once.

See what happens when you do a PhD kids you eventually go crazy.

Can’t thinking is when we are faced with the opportunity to change or do something and we say ‘can’t’.  The Late Russell Ackoff highlighted this is something of his I read saying that those unchallenged ideas, the one’s that can’t are often not impossible but are considered to be impossible.  They are possible but our mindset tells us it ‘can’t’ be done.  It’s more likely that we won’t try because of what we think or what we expect.  The reality could be completely different.

Newsflash: You won’t know until you try.  So instead of saying ‘can’t’ say ‘won’t’ or ‘yes’ and see what happens.  If you really can’t… then don’t.

Things remain the same.

Things remain the same.

What just happened?

NEWS FLASH: I did not lose my job this time, instead I move to International Business and Asian Studies.  I will teach Information Systems from there until the next time things change.

As you were.

1. People only buy ‘popular’ media online.

I think the idea of the Long Tail has promise.  In fact I have it in my lectures.  You could argue that the internet is another culture with it’s own ideas on what the mainstream is, what the 80-20 rule constitutes and what they like.  The mainstream internet, things that grow to popularity on the internet, should be considered in context as being part of internet culture.   You can’t compare what becomes popular on the internet to what is considered popular on television for one very good reason.  They are two completely different mediums.  This becomes obvious when you look at how poorly the transition to the internet fiction has had.  It’s still stagnant, backwater or very very obscure.  That is internet culture. A question for artists, business people and the like is: how do internet cultures buy and sell?  How do I tell a story on the internet and support myself as an artist without losing heart?  The long tail explains the possibilities but doesn’t give us the pragmatics.

And this is my biggest problem with the ideas of internet business models.  It’s still geared towards the mainstream, just a different one: internet culture mainstream.  We have heard the mantra connect with fans and give them a reason to buy yet how do we find fans with no money?  What if you are selling something that’s unappealing to internet culture?  Then what?  This is what we need to learn.  And I am not saying that there is no long tail effect there is, my point: How much of that is simply because the internet contains so many interlocking cultures?  Can you compare the apples (TV) with oranges (internet)?  Probably but the shape, tastes and sizes of markets are completely different.   We need to look at it differently.

2. The internet could level the playing field but you have to realise it’s another field altogether

My second and final point is that the internet creates the potential for disintermediated content to become popular because it’s the internet.  Something that’s popular on television may or may not become popular on the internet.  We really need to spend more time looking at internet trends and usage before we can make the claim that it levels out the playing field.

We need new business concepts not just models

I think a way forward for internet business ideas is good quality research.  In the days of e-commerce all we had was Michael Porter on the internet.  What we need is better thinking.   I am personally hoping for this but seeing precious little more than the free culture versus copyright debate.  New ideas not the same old crap.

*Note: I am not sure this makes sense.  I am absent of mind at the moment.  Feel free to comment (constructively).

Idea fences mean we create a way of seeing things that inhibits us from seeing another perspective.  Someone I know would say about a problem,’Well it’s either this or that.’  My response was, ‘why can’t it be something else?’.  The idea fences we build put the issues we want to discuss in a neat little basket.  We fence them off and say, ‘this is my position and you can only enter my idea house if you are willing to open the fence of my idea gate’.   Metaphors ahoy.

I am very good at making idea fences.  I often resist changing my ideas because I like them and have grown accustomed to having them in my mind’s garden.  Yet, I know I have to do it and I hate it.   I think I know something then I find an article or somebody says, ‘have you thought about this?’ Then I hop back on the merry go round again and wheeeeeee more ideas.   Ideas also mean power in my world, ‘Oh you are the guy who wrote that paper or you are an Information Systems person aren’t you?’   Then I am fenced in by others.  This kind of fencing reinforces the fence around me, which in essence has no place in any real terms outside of my own thoughts; and creates a comfortable seat for me to sit in and contemplate.   I am fenced and fencing.

In closing this ramble tamble, let me assure that ideas have a persistent quality.  The ingredient of persistence is ‘belief’.  That’s what makes them real.  We believe they are and so they are and we act on them and it is so.  Yet, this perspective is yet another example of a fence I have built around myself and ask me in five years, if I am still alive what I think and the chances are I will have changed my mind!

EA games are losing money.

Think about it.  That is a big statement.  So what are they doing to fix it:

1. Downsizing

2. Bringing out fewer games (my favourite Cricket game was one of these that suffered at the hands of this ‘downturn’.

Two things I would have thought are drastic measures for such a big player.  Why do companies downsize in a downturn?  Instead of thinking up new ideas and using the talent you have to innovate to recover lost profits, you decide to get rid of people?  Do you know what kind of message that sends to other employees?  Bringing out less titles.  Why not bring out more on a smaller scale?  As the article says:

Instead of spending $60 on a shiny new disc, many people are playing free or cheap games online, on their mobile devices and on Facebook. They are spending a few dollars here and there to buy virtual add-ons for the games, or they are signing up for subscription-based online games.

Find new models EA!  Don’t just sit around waiting for people to decide to buy disks again.  Make new models!  You are the industry leader in games and personally speaking gave me great pleasure with your titles.  What are some ways you could release a niche game cheaply and support it with trendy new ideas around new business models?

If EA games goes under then the world will end as I know it.  Well not the world… just the fun part of it.

If you want to be a leading writer, you have to write and keep at it until you get good enough.  That will take a lot of time.  If you want to sing and be the best you can, you need to practice.  Anything that’s easy or ‘at hand’ is usually simple to learn and master.   The cost versus the benefit in that equation is something like this:

Simple thing + Low Skill = Low Benefit.

However, if we raise the barrier it should look like this:

Hard thing + hard skill = High Benefit.

However, there is something missing from that equation and it’s this:

Value + Hard thing + Hard Skill = High Benefit.

You could say it this way, the more value increases the higher the cost to you and to your consumers, students, partners, chickens and whatever other relevant category you would to shove in here.

Now I have added another cost to the learning of a skill that has been overlooked.  The free business model idea hinges on value, as do most other ideas.  Without value you can work as hard as you like at giving things away and it won’t matter a damn.   If we take a poorly written book or a bad movie and say, ‘I don’t know how anyone can like that’, the answer is value.

So what is the cost associated with value?

A colleague whom I teach with made one also:

These videos were well received, at least by me   The following was one we made with the whole class, including myself and Alison, inputting their ideas as we discussed them:

The only point I have is this: it doesn’t have to be boring, and it doesn’t have to be trendy, ok that’s two points.  Be clever and work collaboratively, you may be surprised what you learn.

I had pushed through the burn as they say and found that at the end of the road, even if I wrote something, it was crap.  Yes, more crap than usual and I would have to write the whole damn thing again from scratch.

Take it from me… don’t overwork your brain.

A final thought for today: Things are what we make them.  Susan Boyle, RATM, Radiohead, Nine inch nails, Corey Smith… it’s up to us.  We live in a unique time where you can reach an audience via electronic means.  Making money is the hard part but people are having a go and that’s great to see.

I am off to the Zoo… it’s my daughter’s birthday!

Call it corporate objectives, call it ‘profit’, call it what you like, but the minute you put money and the corporation ahead of human decency you have sold your soul to the corporation and you have become it’s property.  Just wait until the wheel turns and it’s your turn to be crushed into powder.

Next time you are faced with the choice see what you will do, I guarantee you will almost always struggle to make the ‘ethical’ choice.

Problems can only be practically solved because of the things we take to practically restrict their solving them.  People often blame politics, the environment, marketing, accounting but the biggest issue is what’s feasible or practical to do, given the known constraints.  There is a big difference between assumption and actual barrier, yet the actual barriers can be nothing else but thought in the beginning even though it may actually be a real issue that would hinder the problem solving effort.   Thinking, as someone said (sorry), doesn’t make it so.   The truth may be what happens after we do something, not sure about that; yet there is a level of pragmatism that always drives decision making in business.  We can’t do this because of that and we can’t do that because of this.   We need to think through these barriers carefully to see if they are real or a matter of our discourse.

One example happened to me years ago when I tried my hand at business.  We kept making decisions because ‘we had to’ and over a period of time the direction I blissfully steered the business to failed.  Each decision was thought out, reasoned over, implemented with an eye to improvement.  Yet as complexity unfolded, new ideas emerged which reset my decision parameters and modified my heuristics, I realised I was playing a fools game.  There was no ‘right’ answer, only what was feasible and known to me at the time and with the resources that I had to use.    Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber talked about this years ago, yet in all the work I have done, I have seen little progress in this regard.  Complexity is a bitch. Scholars like the late Herbert Simon called it decision making under ambiguity, what decisions are made that don’t contain that?  Tell me if you know.

The hidden tiger of decision making and complex problem solving is complexity.  It laughs at us when we confront it with our ideas, and changes shape the minute we make a choice.  What’s known becomes unknown and what seemed ‘right’ becomes not right after the action has been taken.  Is the truth something that happens to an idea as William James said?  Maybe.  Perhaps the truth is not just what happens to the idea but the reasons why it didn’t work in the first place.  It is elusive, nevertheless.

I remember a dog that was in our family, owned by the most annoying of all relatives, that was large, ungainly, smelly and loud.  When you saw him for the first time in a while, he would rush at you wagging his tremendous tail, knocking over vases, cups, small children and whatever stood in reasonable distance.  He was clumsy and would overpower you with his weight for that bizarre licking ritual that big dogs like so much.  When that happened you would wind up being covered in saliva, waving your arms about like a helpless moron and wondering why you made the journey to said relatives place in any case.  To say that big dogs are ugly and annoying is not fair because you can’t blame the dog for its form. You just have to except it.  And yes, a big dog is very loyal  (Loyalty, a quality absent from most organisations and sadly from most people) but the Chihuahua offers more than any of the other species of dog.

You could be under attack by a swooping bird (and I have been many times) or a Doberman and at the risk of all that is reasonable or even ‘worth it’ for most dogs, your Chihuahua would come running at the speed of light to ‘save’ you from the would-be assailant.   I remember once that my late Chihuahua attacked a dog at least twenty times his size, only to be picked up in the bigger dogs mouth and spat out, simply because he felt his owner was threatened.  When my first child was brought home, he sat there faithful watching over to make sure nobody could come near her, he was her ‘protector’.  Such is their loyalty, they will defend you and be there no matter what, even if it means their own hide.

Many years ago I used to have the privilege of visiting a farm for horse riding.  I was very lucky considering that people in my socio-economic class were lucky to even see a horse let alone sit on one.  I remember that the lady, a close friend of my mothers, had a little Chihuahua named ‘Garlic’.  A horse was taken by this little dog and thought it a novelty and placed its giant nose over the dog to see what it was.  I was surprised when the small, three-kilogram, dog jumped up and bit the horse squarely on the nose.  The horse was so shocked that it took two steps backward in utter dismay at the small creature that had dared to bite him.  Not only is the Chihuahua loyal, but they have attitude.  Most dogs are dumb, sad to say, and will run around chasing Frisbees or copulating with anything that looks even remotely doable.  A Chihuahua, despite the relative size of its brain, is cunning. You only need to realise that they can make you believe that it’s your fault for biting a horse, that you know this to be true.  If the little dog could speak it would have said,

‘I’m sorry but what the hell was the horse doing near me anyway, this is my space not his!’

Another thing a Chihuahua brings to a relationship is a sense of knowing which assholes not to let into your life.  They are excellent at detecting people of poor character.  I remember one time my aforementioned dog (may God rest his soul), would constantly attack a woman that would visit.  For no reason in particular, he would launch and begin biting her furiously[1].  My wife and I were left with no idea as to the reason for this violence. (Perhaps she wore a scent that made him think). Then a few years later, through the grapevine, we found out that she had abandoned her husband and taken to sleeping around with more than one person, and left him largely in the lurch with a small child they shared custody of.  Our dog knew she was a slut long before we did!  Incredible to think that a beast, no taller than a workman’s boot, can sense evil when it sees’s it.  This was not a singular affair either, it was on many an occasion.  One time we had to work hard to get rid of the problematic person but we eventually did it, long after my little Chihuahua had passed on. Yes, I have lost even more friends because my dog didn’t like a particular person and to this end it has always worked out for the best.

The final and most important part of having a Chihuahua is the love they offer in return for your companionship.  You will have friends that will dessert you, your dumbass relatives will fight with you but no matter what you do to your poor little Chihuahua, they will never leave your side.  You could be engulfed in flames or dying on a floor from a gunshot wound and your dog would defend you and sit there beside you.  You could hit the dog with a rolled up newspaper and they would forgive you, almost instantly, because they know what loyalty means.  Most people I have had the displeasure of spending time with, want something from me and aren’t interested in me or what I have to say.  It’s not about companionship, loyalty or friendship with most people, it’s about what’s in it for them.  With a Chihuahua they ask for your trust, love and companionship right to the very end of their short, meaningful little lives.  Their eyes never betray you for an instant, they never really have a secret plan to steal your job, or go behind your back to take something from you because they love you, unconditionally.

They never ask you for money or take advantage of you, sure they might steal your pillow or your seat when you rise to grab a coffee or to go the toilet, sure they are cunning, but that’s part of their spirit and I like that.  They don’t want to borrow or beg, unless of course ham is involved.  They need us and we them and put simply that’s why the Chihuahua is a wonderful dog: they exemplify what a dog should be… a true companion.

The idea basically is that to have a ‘hit’ you must understand timing.  Books like the Tipping Point go a long way to explaining the ‘how’ but leave out a very important ‘why’.  The best example I have found of this kind of resonance is Cutthroat Island.  It actually bankrupted an organisation yet it was about pirates, adventure and has since proven to be a winning formula.   What went wrong?  Timing for one and before you start and say what most people say when a box office hit FAILS, no the movie wasn’t all that bad either.  A lot of people didn’t go to see it, which is why it’s a timing problem.

When timing fails so does everything else.  You can be first to market, as I was, with ideas that are now being taken up and sure it makes you pull your hair out and still fail miserably.  Why?  People aren’t ready they haven’t developed the need for it and the cycle of innovation hasn’t reached it peak.  I call to memory Kindle versus the Rocket E-Book reader and others.  You can argue that it’s the technology or the framework, which it may be, but it my mind it’s timing.

The best example I have found of this is e-learning.  Years ago (1996) we were told that the ‘internet’ was going to replace formal education structures because this new technology would revolutionise education.  Thirteen years later and a recent announcement by the incumbent Vice Chancellor of University of New England states that ‘blended learning’ (e-learning pretty much) is the way of the future!  It was the way of the future in 1996!  Why is there a massive uptake of it now?  People are ready for it.  People weren’t ready for Geena Davis back then but they were very ready for Johnny Depp.

In finishing up the hits and misses series I want to say that it’s horribly complex.  A hit is often the result of pipe size and audience engagement and resonance.  It is also a matter of the right time.  How can we know if people are ready for our products?  Research?  It’s very hard to say.  It could be like Rittell and Webber argue that we will not know what works until we try or what William James said, ‘the truth is what happens to an idea’.  The truth is unpredictable, complex, ever changing and multifarious.  Yet if we study the patterns of engagement and the time in which popularity occurs we can begin to understand what a hit is and a what a miss is.  And yes we should seek to understand these things through a systemic strategic lens!

Engagement

The level of excitement we feel for something and the degree of participation that it causes us due to that excitement, is what I like to call engagement.   Engagement is not purely participation, that connotes mere activity; engagement is more an emotional and social response to things that excite us because it provokes activity.  When you watch the news for example there will be a story on it at some point that grips you.  It will grab a hold of you and shake you in some way.  For me, it’s stories on the housing market.  Stories such as how there will be another boom.  It causes me to swear, rise up out of my seat, and wave two fingers at the presenter.  It engages me and causes me to engage.  The biggest reason things fail is lack of engagement.

Examples of lack of engagement

Whether it be the failing of a university program (INFORMATION SYSTEMS) or the decline in interest in television shows, the ultimate failure of any mass produced vehicle is the result of declining engagement.  Great, you say, that’s wonderful… I already knew that.   Ok smart ass, what then is the primary reason why people stop engaging?  Interest?  Probably, I believe it’s because the program in question no longer creates ‘engagement’ space for participants.   This means creating new opportunities for conversations and new examples of how to create those conversations.  A key example of this can be found in the recent movie, ‘Tenacious D: Pick of Destiny.’

The movie itself is largely for fans, herein lies the problem.  The fan base for Tenacious D probably couldn’t generate 40 million dollars worth of movie dollars. Why?  Well the movie didn’t create the engagement space for people who weren’t fans.  Watching it, I loved it because I am a fan, and I could relate to at least 60% of all the jokes on screen.  I had seen it before, I had heard the riffs that are used as cues in important parts of the movie and I was aware of the history.  If my wife watched that she would have no engagement space there because she has no idea about Tenacious D or their history.  In all honesty, Tenacious D probably should have made the movie more accessible to non-fans.   Then again, maybe they still wouldn’t have engaged because they didn’t know who they were anyway?  On the other hand maybe they can’t grow their fan base?

Another example of how to maintain an engagement or to put it simply: keep people talking, can be found in the on-going popularity of Lost.  At each turn they introduced something new, exciting and interesting, that create the engagement space for on-going conversations.  There was a point at which it did seem like Lost was, ‘everything happens for a season.’  But now, the bigger picture is being unveiled and it’s creating conversations.  This doesn’t just apply to movies either, can you do something where you work to create conversations?

Why Things Become Popular

Ok, so I don’t have a social psychology background or enough of an idea to explain why things become super popular.  Here’s what I know, for me it comes down to a few key things.

1. Creating Engagement Space (or creating conversations)

All of human kind communicate.  They share information with each other and have done for centuries.  In order to facilitate the popularity of something you need to have something that people will talk about.  This is why excellent service increases business overtime and why programs fail … it works both ways.  The concept of leverage provides a useful metaphor here.  If you have something that people want, you have leverage and provided you find a way they can talk about it, they will.  This works in the negative and the positive.  For instance, if you have a degree program that is failing the first thing to do is to find out why.  How do you find that out?  By talking at length to participants.  My first instinct is: why aren’t you spreading the word about how great we are?

Sure you might be tempted to make a whole lot of people redundant, transfer load or worst do nothing.  Find out why people aren’t talking positively about your stuff and boom I guarantee you will turn things around… if you catch it in time. Negative leverage is as easy to create as positive leverage… especially in a social network where trust, sharing and conversation abound.

2. Facilitating the conversation

You can’t control what people say but you can control what you do in order to help them say what they say.  Here’s an example: I went to sea-world last year and I wanted a coffee.  What I got was hot watery milk.  I went to Borders the other day and asked for a book (Outliers) and I already had $200 worth of books in my arms.  The lady told me it was out the back and promptly returned to doing something else.  See?  Now I have told you because Borders made it easy for me to facilitate a negative conversation.  Sure, I could just suck it up but I was amazed that they didn’t want another sale… I left after that because I didn’t want to spend any more of my faculties money!  They didn’t want me to spend my money.

3. Making the transition from conversation to action easy

William James said that the truth was something that happens to an idea.  It’s the active part.  When we go from talking about something to using it, if we find it difficult and hard to manage.  When I was in business last time this was the single flaw that stood out more than others.  What I was trying to sell wasn’t easy to use.  I could start conversations but they would always end in a bad experience for the customer.  It isn’t enough to create conversations, you have to make it easy for people to access and use what you are talking about.  Make it hard and the engagement fails and people will begin talking about alternatives.

4. Maintaining the conversation

Once we have access to the material, keep us there.  You know amazon made a fortune of it’s recommendation engine?  It nearly went broke until it realised (or they realised) that selling things to existing customers helps your bottom line.  Maintenance… simple maintenance!  Things become popular and stay there because we ‘maintain’ the conversation.  Stop doing that, yes you who don’t answer your email or respond to customer queries online… YOU, and people will talk about something else.  Keep the flow of customer interaction going.  Don’t believe me?  Go to twitter search and look for a product.  You’ll see why Dell made 3 million dollars off twitter.

5. Creating new spaces for engagement and innovating conversations

In closing this second part it’s important to look for ways to create new conversations and use those to develop innovation.  Things maintain popularity because they keep us talking and constantly create new ways for us to do so.  Without discourse and then action you have nothing.  New conversations must continue the old ones and add something interesting to the existing one.  The Lost people do this by keeping us guessing.  Others are much better at this and do it by testing the boundaries of the audience.

In the final part of my epic blog trilogy I want to talk about the ‘cutthroat island’ problem and some things that are conversation worthy don’t become popular.

The theory of the day is the long tail, a reworking of the Pareto Principle (i.e. 80% of the wealth of Italian landowners is concentrated in the hands of 20% of the people), which seeks to explain why hits and misses wind up where they do.  In real terms the idea is a useful w to explain why, in theory, 80% of all that’s consumed accounts for 20% of all products and so on.  Ironically, this is not a reflection on taste as the following video explains, it’s a reflection of the method of distribution and supply (I call it pipe size).  Yet this is not what determines a ‘hit’.  Not in my opinion.  A hit is determined by many different things… which I will talk about in a minute.

Pipe size has to do with a number of things.  We all have a certain amount of influence and as such we can distribute messages to people via our own methods of communication.  When someone in the family dies or a baby comes along, the pipes of family communication get to work and the word spreads.  Some us are more influential ’sneezers’ as Seth Godin calls them, and we can have a broader impact.  But it’s not a formula and neither is it a constant reason why.  The concept of ‘engagement’ or ‘resonance’ as someone else I know put it, explains why things are spread around.   We participate.  When this occurs on a massive scale the network gets bigger, the pipes get bigger and massive demand is generated.

The long tail works as a technical explanation quite well, that is, it explains how ‘pipe size’ and demand and supply corroborate to create ‘hits’.  Yet, it fails to adequately explain why hits occur.  This fails in the realm of the unpredictability of human ’systems’.   Human systems form groups, make meaning and do what I call ‘engage’.  William James said it this way, ‘the truth is something that happens to an idea… not the idea itself’ (that’s a paraphrase by the way).  While I don’t wish to debate the idea of what truth is, I want to touch on what James was saying in my lateral understanding of it anyway.  Why things become popular can be stated as: they become popular because we engage with it on a massive scale (big pipes), we spread it around and share it (talking –> see Tipping Point, Idea Virus), and we resonate or engage with it.   This latter concept, the idea of engagement is the most understated yet most powerful because big pipes don’t guarantee a hit, engagement does.  What level of participation do people have in an idea?  A high amount, then you have success, a low amount depending on the context you have a different kind of success, or you have a failure.

Success and failure come down to audience engagement yet we cannot ignore pipe size, marketing or methods of supply.  We have to consider these as important, yet the level of engagement, discussion and talk around a product or idea and the overall level of activity, is what propels a product to success.  This is what the publishing, music and other industries know and exploit all the time.  Consider this qoute from a well known literary Agent Donald Maas:

The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the customer is already familiar with the author.  In other words, readers are buying brand-name authors whose work they have already read and enjoyed.  The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee.  That process is called word of mouth.  Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies … samplers, first chapters circulated by email, Web sites and the like.  In most cases, someone reads a novel, gets excited about it, and tells a friend. (Taken from Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas).

Now we know this and we can reliably track all success (yes I said ALL!) down to people.  You know why, everything social is social.  Wow, it took three degrees for me to work that out but it’s true.  Everything social is social.  Nothing happens without people.  We have fancy ideas such as those found on the shelves of Borders yet in reality the process of sharing information and excitement has not changed ever.   What is hard to know is what is likely to be a hit and what is likely to be a miss.  Pipe size has a lot to do with it of course.  The bigger the pipes, the bigger the exposure.  Yet, in this world of media falling apart and the growing disintermediation of media, the pipes are awfully big and the potential for sharing for word of mouth is the biggest and most responsive it has ever been thanks to the internet.   Still this is no guarantee of resonance, or engagement, big pipes don’t guarantee success

I will finish part 1 with a story on the recent television phenomenon Flash Forward.

A colleague of mine pointed me towards twitter search a while ago and sent me a link when Flash Forward was on.  I watched as real time feedback about the show, jokes and other randomness came up one tweet at a time.   I saw people saying what they liked and didn’t like about the show to their friends on the twitter (sorry couldn’t resist) and then sharing with others in other networks these thoughts.  Watching the conversations go through in real time showed me how unpredictable and different we really are, and how the idea of the long tail is relevant.   Now on to Part 2… Coming Soon: Engagement and why things become popular!

Some very interesting people here… too interesting and too smart.