Digigen & The TinMan

For many, there is a desperation for a “Like”. As one of the planners said here the other day, if someone asked you “do you like me?” in every single conversation, you would probably hit them or think they were a bit weird. 2010 has certainly be the year of the “Like” and fortunately, in 2011 sensible people will be trying to put a value on what this actually means.

In a few conversations I have had, people talk about loyalty when they talk about a “Like”, some even talk about “intent to purchase”. Alot of these people do not know what they are talking about. Loyalty to a brand cannot be defined as a “Like” especially when these people that like the page “believe this “loyalty” should be rewarded with discounts and vouchers”. Loyalty has never been defined by people looking for a great deal, because when this great deal goes… so does the user.

A “Like” for me is nothing more than an intent to participate. It is not a participation itself, it is an intent to participate if you the brand, the product, give me a genuine reason to participate further. Yes, the “Like” opens up a socialCRM channel for brands, but why is this valuable if these people are not actively participating in your community. So for me, brands should be thinking about how we convert an intent to participate to actual participation (commenting, liking content, responding, uploading, activating, shooting). When they have nailed this, then surely the next step is understanding actual value of a participating like and actual value of a non-participating like.

After all, this is what it looks like when someone really does “Like” your brand

I’d be interested in hearing how your brands and businesses value the “Like”. Respond in the comments below.

Time’s Person of the Year in 2010 has been announced as Mark Zuckerberg. I have criticised this on Twitter which met with a prompt questioning from @joshspear. I thought I had a valid reason for questioning why Mark Zuckerberg deserves this ahead of other global game changers, so thought I would get down what I think the Time Person of the Year should represent. Bearing in mind this is my opinion and as I have no gauge of personality of the other “winners” I can only judge on my instinct.

For me the Time Person of the Year should have an equation which looks like the following:

Person of the Year = Personality x Contribution to Global Community x Cultural Impact x Influence

So, you could argue that Mark Zuckerberg has contributed to the global community in 2010, but I don’t necessarily believe that he owned the year in terms of contribution to the global community. Surely someone like Julian Assange has contributed more by opening up the underhand/overhand techniques of global surveillance, backhanders and general bad do-ing through Wikileak, getting governments to rethink how they classify data, what they do, how they act.

Arguably, Zuckerberg’s greatest contribution is the cultural impact of creating a technology that allows the sociological shift to multiple (often overstated) connections and communities. However, although Zuckerberg is probably the most successful (current) social network developer and founder, channels like MySpace, Friendster existed before Zuckerberg brought his Harvard network to the masses. Of course, Facebook is culturally important to us and the global community but will it still be viewed as a seismic shift that happened in 2010? For me this is just as important, wasn’t 2009 Facebook’s year? 2010, simply the next step? (If the stories about a Facebook Killer coming out of Google are true, will Mark Zuckerberg simply be another digital story that falls by the wayside, a bit like Detroit and the motor Industry)

Personality as @joshspear pointed out to me, is entirely subjective. Sadly I haven’t had the chance to meet anyone in the top tier of Time Person of the Year. However, the camera doesn’t lie and I think personality is something that Mark Zuckerberg certainly doesn’t seem to have in droves. My feeling being that its not his personality that has driven him to success, but the technology behind him that has enabled him to reach this accolade. Would the technology have had the same effect on anybody running it and Mark simply in a good place at a good time?

Influence. Influence is hard to categorise, subjective to the extreme. When Mark speaks the tech community listens, does the global community care what Mark thinks though? Does your layman in India, London, Malaysia, Tokyo care what Mark thinks? I would say not. If you look at past winners they are kings and queens, captains of global industries, somehow I think Mark gets lost in the crowd. This isn’t to say Mark isn’t influential of course he is, I just think influence needs to be categorised in the right way.

Of course, Mark’s achivements cannot be denied. 600m users of Facebook. A billionaire. A generous spirit, donating over 50% of his salary to the “Giving Pledge”. We would all like to be Mark Zuckerberg, to be at the forefront of digital industry but my feeling (and I’m happy to be chastised) is that Mark Zuckerberg would have been more worthy in 2009, maybe earlier. 2010, just doesn’t seem as much his year as others…but hey.. I’d like to meet him to make up my mind. anyone?

Perhaps The Social Network film was a pretty big help…maybe?

This is a great bit of work from a guy called Paul Butler, who spent time trying to figure out how to visualise friendships across Facebook. It took alot of work but by using some open source technology Paul developed a stunning picture.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

Link here to the full story.

At 7.13am this morning, the Health Ministers Select Committee decided to wage war on alocohol advertising. (link here) The call for a pre-9pm ban on alcohol advertising seems to make sense to me although you could argue that many news stories and newspapers carry more messages about alcohol advertising throughout the day. Nevertheless, the ban is designed to inflict an effect on the “quantity” of advertising not the actual message. This isn’t suprising given I covered Budwesier’s recent “aspirational” £1m campaign which was everywhere including the IMAX Cinema at Waterloo, which has daily school’s showings of films.

It isn’t limited to traditional routes to market however, as ministers have turned on social networking sites in a bid to completely remove alcohol advertising from these channels. » Read the rest of this entry «

Seemingly this Sunday is proving quite a good one for some digital thinking from brain MBB. Normally reserved for one post a day or one a week, this is the third today and perhaps they may be some more to come tonight.

The term Social Graph was initially coined by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook about a year ago, but has since become the choice of term for all those “Social Media Gurus” out there. A Social Graph is effectively your level of connection and interaction, your connectedness within platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Your Social Graph is where the smart platforms will monetize your connectivity. I believe this is where Facebook will make a significant income and help justify their valuation.

But what does it mean to us, the consumer, Joe Public. Well, the Social Graph won’t just make money for Facebook. It will make money for you as well. So you aren’t laughing at those people with 2,000 connections now are you? Effectively, the Social Graph allows you to become an affiliate.

An especially powerful affiliate in my eyes as 78% of consumers say they have bought products within social networks on the recommendation of a friend, 45% have bought products based on any recommendation in a social network. There is clearly money to be made.

If you imagine that for every person you have a connection to, in my case 200 on Facebook, there is the potential that another 10 per person may see your message. If I post a recommendation on a product into my news feed it will go into 200 other news feeds, plus be seen by a potential audience of 2,000. Say for example, I am working on a CPA basis of £5 and I get a conversion of 5%, (Car Insurance perhaps?) that would give me a return of £500 simply for a short recommendation on Facebook. Suddenly the proposition seems pretty attractive.

There are companies who do this sort of thing already, BzzAgent is one that springs to mind. However, the ultimate is the more genuine of being able to act as an affiliate for a brand you really love.
Fancy figuring out your potential income from your social graph? http://apps.facebook.com/viralloop