29 December 2011

Influencer marketing, peers and trust: two speculative stories

01. The attraction of influencer marketing is in being able to leverage word-of-mouth and peer recommendations.

02. This is valuable because peer influence is the most effective form of influencing what we buy, or what we feel about a brand. [source]

03. Peer influence has this impact because it’s advice from people we trust. Key to almost every definition of an influencer is their credibility and realness:

“Broadly I define an ‘influencer’ as someone who follows their own path, is rooted in creativity, and is looking for new ways to change or redefine their world. Someone who is an ‘influencer’ not only has broad relationships but also has deep relationships. In short, they are building a community around shared beliefs, principles, and interest.”

Philip McKenzie, Managing Partner at FREE DMC and Founder of Influencer Conference: [source]

04. We trust our friends and family because we have known them a long time and feel emotionally close to them.

05. This means we believe that their recommendations will have our best interests at heart.

But what happens when brands come in and try to get a piece of the action?

1a. MediaCorp have identified Amelia as influential about Personal Personality Monitoring Devices (PPMDs). They send her their new product, SomaTech, in the hope that she will talk about it to her sphere of influence and generate increased purchases.

2a. As a personal branding expert, Amelia is savvy to influencer marketing. She knows she needs to deliver visibility if she’s to continue receiving shiny freebies, so she schedules a series of tweets about the product for the next week. Each is very proper, including the brandname, the hashtag the PR had sent, and exhorting retweets from her followerbase with one too many exclamation marks.

3a. Amelia has 4,000 followers on Twitter, but two-thirds are bots or other personal branding gurus (or both), and the rest she purchased at $2.50 – $4 per follower. [source]. Almost everything she tweets is automated from Oprah Winfrey’s Paper.li, but she does also auto-schedule interactions with her sockpuppet accounts to keep her Engagement score up. This helps keep the free shiny things flowing from the social media PRs

4a. Amelia’s tweets about the SomaTech are retweeted a respectable 30 times each, and along with Amelia’s 15 positive mentions of the product herself, MediaCorp are happy.

5a. However MediaCorp haven’t connected up their Twitter analytics with their store’s Google analytics or purchase data. If they did, they’d see Amelia only generated 20 clickthroughs and no purchases. This is because her highly automated copy-cat content is followed by almost no real, active human beings. (One of the bots did try to buy something but the transaction was declined as their card was registered in Zurich and their shipping address, Belarus.)

6a. Next week Amelia shoots a YouTube segment for MediaCorp’s competitor’s personality monitor, SimSoothe, who sent her not just a free device but $250 as well. The video gets trolled by 4-Chan and goes viral.

The kind of social media user who’s highly receptive to sharing brand promotions may not be generating content that real people value. Influence metrics are highly gameable and, if incentivised by freebies, attract game-players – not the “real people” marketers actually want.

1b. So MediaCorp improve their influencers algorithm and have another go:

2b. Bill’s a normal guy, albeit the linchpin of his group of friends. He’s a bit surprised to receive the free SomaTech device as he’d tumbld just the other day about PPMDs being a bit creepy. This had got a bunch of reblogs and sparked a bit of a debate.

3b. Bill’s not sure what to do with the SomaTech, but his mum raised him proper so he knows that if he receives a gift, he’s got to say thanks. So he writes a blog post as MediaCorp requested, which is auto-shared to his other social networks.

4b. Bill’s ex-boyfriend sees his post. He knows MediaCorp have been exploting child labour in the Philippines, and sees an opportunity to embarass Bill. “Since when were you such a slut that you did everything some big company told you to? I remember that time we were talking about….” An argument breaks out among their friends.

5b. “Mate, seriously? That time you suggested I should get those Blahphonic headphones? Was that you, or, you know, something you’d been told to say?” asks Cate. Bill feels really awkward – it’s the fifth time he’s been asked that question this week.

6b. Bill disables his Facebook account, Tumblr etc – making him an early adopter of the Going Analogue trend, and influencing three friends to follow. But as he no longer has a social media presence, his departure goes tragically un-curated.

If customers know that peer recommendations have been purchased by brands, many will stop trusting these friends’ recommendations. This is pretty corrosive to the friendship – and defeats the brand marketer’s purpose too.

So what if publicly disclosed “I did this because Brand X paid me” is individually toxic to personal credibility – but sneaky (non-disclosed) influencer marketing is socially toxic to friends’ trust?

Perhaps the only circumstances in which it works is celebrity influencer marketing – but only where there is no relationship of trust between celeb and fans. To participate in influencer marketing is to say, “I see my friendships as social capital, and I’ll exchange them for a fee”. Works fine for celebs who’re selling themselves (*kough, Kardashians*) but among almost every other social media user? Rather more double-edged.

17 December 2011

Peak freedom?

I read an article a week ago which argued that this – here, now – is what peak oil looks like

A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing political systems across the industrial world into a rising spiral of dysfunction and internal conflict.

With most grades of oil above $100 a barrel, economies around the world mired in a paper “recovery” worse than most recessions, and the United States and European Union both frozen in political stalemates between regional and cultural blocs with radically irreconcilable agendas, that prophecy has turned out to be pretty much square on the money, but you won’t hear many people mention that these days.

The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like, which of course has been happening here in the United States for some years already.

[John Michael Greer, What Peak Oil Looks Like, 7 December 2011]

What if we have also reached ‘peak freedom’ – the maximum extent of individual freedoms and civil liberties?

Europe and America became considerably more free through the 19th and 20th centuries. Slavery was abolished; women gained the vote; homosexuality decriminalised and employment and welfare reforms provided a baseline of freedom from exploitation and freedom for all to have a chance at a decent living. We gained the right to unionise; to (all) own private property; that everyone could access legal representation through legal aid if they couldn’t afford their own defence. From the Chatterley trial, to journalist’s privilege not to name sources, to the rise of internet we have gained increasing freedoms of thought and expression.

Where next?

Wednesday I met up with an old, old friend by name of @metaleptic. We talked about 2011 and the coming end of the world – and what felt significant about our conversation is that perhaps for the first time I was as pessimistic as him.

What happened in 2011?

The Met Police, Tory government and supposedly independent judiciary seeking to criminalise all forms of protest that aren’t walking along a pre-determined march route (and how long will they keep authorising big protest marches, you wonder?)
Kettling, mass arrests, police infiltrators, 944 deaths in police custody since 1990. Et cetera
The US Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which gives the military (not the police) authority over domestic terror investigations and interrogations…
…allows for indefinite detention without trial of absolutely anyone suspected of being a terrorist…
…and defines the whole of the United States as a “battlefield”.
The normalisation of drone warfare and extra-judicial killings of British citizens in Pakistan, a country we are not at war with
SOPA and the Digital Economy Act threatening basic internet freedoms

What’s coming in the rest of my lifetime?

The start of a four-degree or more rise in global temperatures, leading to extreme weather events and potentially the total loss of climate equilibrium (then god knows what)
The oil runs out, as does rather a lot of minerals we use to make rather a lot of things
The water runs out and large parts of the globe become uninhabitable
Starving and/or displaced people in the billions
Fortress Europe to (try to) keep them out of our (collapsing) economies and welfare states
A geriatric population in the West no longer producing wealth but functioning as a massive voting block to stymie any change. (Actually Hugo and I did disagree here – he’s more cynical and doubts even the veneer of democracy, voting etc will survive. I predict a mere move through simulacra into simulation.)

Given that, then – Year of Protest or not – how is there any likelihood that the world will get more free?

The question becomes simply when we passed the peak – before or after 9/11?

8 December 2011

Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data

“Big data” has been one of the buzzwords of 2011, and grand claims are being made for its power:

The world is becoming data-ized as digital information and numerical measurement is being applied to all aspects of what people do, particularly things that couldn’t be measured before because it was impractical or impossible. (Think: using wireless and GPS in cars to base insurance premiums on where and when people actually drive, as has been possible since 2007.)

The impact will be as profound as the scientific method in the 18th century — which quickly moved past the sciences and left its mark on all areas of human endeavor. For instance, what is “quantitative decision making” in management, if not the scientific method applied to business…. Likewise, the BigData revolution is plowing through the sciences, and also jumped into mainstream areas, such as business and government.

Data; boring but… by Ken Cukier, 6 March 2011

The problem with these claims is that they conflate increased power to capture and store data with (i) being able to extract meaningful insights from it, and (ii) being able to successfully act on and implement these insights, with (iii) no unexpected or adverse effects. Clearly cracking the first part doesn’t save the world on its own.

Further, big data evangelism often trips over into technocratic thinking, a belief that ‘nerdpower makes right’. Excitable blogposts about exabyte datasets, rather than defining the right problems to solve. Wide-eyed admiration for the amount of data that can be gathered, without recognition for the ethical rightness (or otherwise) of doing so.

Which is to say that big data is fundamentally political. Whether we choose to theorise it as technology or knowledge [actually, there's a good PhD proposal...], the act of recording the world in this way privileges particular values, worldviews and types of action.

In his blog post Lessons of the Victorian data revolution, Pete Warden insightfully makes the connection with technocratic thinking and brings in that great study of central planning, James Scott’s Seeing Like A State:

James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” looks at the legacy of the Victorian scientific revolution, and shows how the very success of its ideas had a dark side. [Similarly,] Creating datasets may help technical people [...] to understand problems and propose solutions, but it also means that [...] other people with deep, lived experience of the domains will be overruled. In the 20th century the prestige of the scientific toolkit was used to justify disasters like the collectivization of agriculture, as technocrats around the world wielded numbers to take power away from “inefficient” smallholders. Those figures were mostly proven bogus by reality, as plans with no knowledge of conditions on the ground failed when confronted with the wildly variable conditions of soil, weather and pests that farmers had spent a lifetime learning to cope with.

Lessons of the Victorian data revolution by Pete Warden

If you’ve not read ‘Seeing Like A State’, incidentally, I recommend it. In it Scott surveys the great utopian schemes of the 20th century, from Le Corbusier’s urban planning in Brasilia to Russian collectivisation of agriculture and China’s Great Leap Forward. Each well-intentioned and yet spectacular failures, with millions of deaths. His argument is that centrally-managed planning does not work because it rides roughshod over the complex interdependencies on the ground.

Perhaps, under ‘big data’ ideology, we might ask – is this not simply a problem of too little information? We have the capacity to measure everything now – did Corbusier or Stalin fail because their data was not sufficiently granular?

Scott would disagree. The problem at hand is not quantity of knowledge but its very type. Common to each central planning disaster is a belief in a high-modernist ideology claiming that science can improve every aspect of human life, and an authoritarian central power willing to effect large-scale re-orderings of society and nature. “Big data will solve everything” can, clearly enough, be another iteration of the same. Scott – and, in fact, Friedrich Hayek’s criticism of centrally-planned economies (The Rule of Serfdom, 1944) – is that this disregards local and personal knowledge (Scott might add, embodied and tacit knowledge), and the complex diversity of organisation required and ends sought. (Hayek may believe that this can be summarised through the price mechanism, but Scott’s metis (local knowledge) is rather less reducible than that.)

Central planning – or big data – may seek to make the complexity of local situations legible to systemised, technocratic thinking – but the two are essentially incommensurable. Talk of ‘big data’ needs to be visible as something bringing with it a particular modernist worldview, and alongside that a particular relationship of power over the specificities – places, people – represented as nodes and datapoints. Technology is rarely value-neutral.

This is not to say, however, that ‘big data’ is necessarily socially oppressive. Perhaps there are alternatives – I am still thinking this through.

In my recent Bugged Planet post, I drew attention to Indy Johar’s tweet where he noted “the asymmetry of personal data, open for the 99% & deep analytics for the 1%” [source]. This raises the question, what if the analytics were open to the 99%? What would this take, what would this look like, and would it actually redistribute power in any way?

6 December 2011

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of @O2′s Twitter audience

Another post via the FACE company blog – see the story in full here: Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter (FACE and O2 @ Warc #Datacentric 2011, London).

This has been some of the most interesting research I’ve done all year and certainly the most technically challenging, so I wanted to share it here too.

In short, FACE and O2 presented at the WARC Datacentric conference in December 2011. To quote Fran’s write-up:

The objective of the O2 Brand Graph pilot was to mine social media data in a way that would allow us to connect it to audience studies. What follows is an initial exploration of how we can you use social media to augment a segmentation model with real-time data.

Whilst tracking social media by keywords allows us to get an understanding of how a specific topic is discussed online, tracking social media by users allows us to build a map of an audience, its hubs, its behaviours and its interests.

We called it the Brand Graph: the conjunction of the Social Graph (defined here as the network of people who are within 2 degrees of separation from the brand through social media channels) and the Interest Graph (the network of interests, topics, activities and behaviours associated with the nodes of the social graph).

What can you do with it?

Dynamically understand who your audience is and how is it changing, in real-time;

Dynamically understand what your audience is about, what makes an interesting topic and how broader cultural conversations affect it;

Segment your audience in clusters based on topics of interest, passions, life stages, professions, online behaviours etc.;

Plan and fine tune the content of your social media strategy;

Engage with your audience in the right way (channels, mechanics, times of the day, tone of voice etc.);

Assess the impact of your strategies in real-time.

Going forward, we see the brand graph becoming one of the key tools to build a seamless connection between your brand and its audience

So, how did we go about building the O2 Brand Graph?

Sample: We defined our sample as the entire audience of O2 on Twitter, i.e. 58.339+ Twitter users who were following @O2 (as of November 2011).

Methodologies: Statistical analysis, Semantic analysis, Network analysis, Netnography and Content analysis.
We then analysed the static data of 58,339 profiles on Twitter gathering insights around 10 key dimensions:

To get this information we had to map 58,339 users following @O2 and who was following each of the 58.339 users.

We ended up plotting a graph of 1 million nodes, 1 million primary connections and 574,278 horizontal connections within the graph.

We then analysed the static data of 58,339 profiles on Twitter gathering insights around 10 key dimensions.

Finally, we analysed 3,120,371 public tweets, 122,220 tweets/day (avg), generated by the @O2 followers over one month (November 2011).

[Source: Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter (FACE and O2 @ Warc #Datacentric 2011, London).]

Here’s the conference presentation:

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter

View more presentations from Face

5 December 2011

Bugged planet

New Wikileaks release on the ‘bugged planet’ – the $5-billion mass surveillance industry selling telecoms and internet monitoring technology.

To date, we have documented a total of 133 of these surveillance weapons dealers, including 36 in the United States, 18 in the United Kingdom, 15 in Germany, 11 in Israel and eight in Italy. As with “traditional” arms dealers, most of them are located in rich and democratic countries. 12 of the 26 countries documented are also part of the European Union, which accounts for 62 of these companies.

87 sell tools, systems and software for monitoring the Internet, 62 for telephone surveillance, while 20 are for spying on SMS messages. 23 are involved in speech recognition, and 14 with GPS geolocalisation. Seven of the companies are also involved in the area of “cyber-war offensives”, selling Trojans, rootkits and other backdoors used to take control of computers remotely and without the knowledge of their users. These spy systems are distinct from those used by ordinary hackers in that they could not be identified by the “majority” of antivirus systems and other computer security solutions.

In Western democracies, the marketing and use of these systems of surveillance and interception of telecommunications is strictly controlled. There is nothing, however, to prevent their sale to countries with weaker restrictions, including to dictatorships. Although these tools are designed for espionage, they are not considered weapons. As such their exportation is controlled by national, European or international laws. Whether or not this business is moral, as things stand it is completely legal.

SPYFILES: REVELATIONS OF A BILLION-DOLLAR MASS SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRY

Spyfiles.org has an interactive graphic showing where these companies are located. It’s a little misleading; it implies these countries are where the technology is used too. Nonetheless worth a look.

New Delhi journalist Sagarika Ghose live-tweeted Assange’s video speech at the HTC Summit on 3rd December. Her take on his key points:

We are entering an age of transparency. The information of ordinary citizens is being accessed and monitored by secretive corporations. Elites are trying to hide information but the data of the common man is more openly available than ever to big companies. Public data, emails etc are being intercepted regularly. We are heading for bulk surveillance of the public to benefit transnational security elites.

A question to Assange: isn’t it better to give up some liberty and privacy in order to be safe?

His response: Giving up personal data to organisations is not part of the democratic covenant. Organisations should be accountable

Sagarika Ghose’s overall take on the presentation was that “Assange either paranoid and delusional or chillingly prophetic..”

However Indy Johar crucially recognises that this is not just a story about government or military surveillance. He tweeted:

The private platform web Facebook twitter etc has accelerated the asymmetry of personal data, open for the 99% & deep analytics for the 1%. [1]
It’s not the openness of our data that is the issue but the hidden predictive analytics, analysis & surveillance undertaken by hidden corps [2]

How exactly can we parse the differences between the Iranian police monitoring social media to crack down on dissidents… the UK police monitoring social media as part of their policing of protests… Vodafone monitoring social media to get advance warning of UK Uncut protests… and Vodafone monitoring social media to better understand their audience and increase sales?

Different ends, to be sure. But what does it mean that the same methods can be used for each?

For each government / corporation, the overarching aim is the same: knowledge = power. Through greater knowledge, the better they believe can control the actions of their consumer/citizenry.

And in each, the consumer/citizen social media user stands in the same relationship to power: asymmetric.

22 November 2011

Social Media Research & the Underbelly of the Internet

[One written for the FACE company blog - hence the slightly different tone. Original story here.]

An underrated skill in social media research is simply knowing what to search for.

Really? You’re interested in a particular brand, so surely you search for that word or phrase, right?

For brands such as Three, Apple, or the AA? Go ahead, give it a go! Just don’t be surprised when you get back a lot of content about “Three ways to boost your Twitter profile”, apple crumble recipes, and AA rated sovereign debt.

Searching the internet

We often describe setting up a social media research search for a brand as like doing a Google search. This is loosely accurate – like Google, a social media research tool ‘crawls’ news, blogs and forums for instances of your keywords. The research tool will also filter social media APIs (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) for instances of these words or phrases.

The problem is that the internet contains a lot more content than you think it does. Normally you never see it, and much of it isn’t even designed for human readers. Here are a few forms this takes:

Challenge 1: SEO spam

Being at the top of Google’s search results is a very valuable place to be if you want to get visitors to your website or online shop. This has made gaming Google results an industry in itself, called SEO: search engine optimisation.

SEO aims to guess Google’s search algorithms to manipulate clients‘ websites to the top of search listings. Google basically rates sites more highly the more in-bound links they have – i.e. the more popular they appear to be. So gaming Google results entails generating a lot of false links and content, with methods including:

Fake news sites reprinting press releases and “content farms”, e.g. Demand Media or Articlesbase
Promo blogs with high numbers of links to the client’s site, with random or copy-pasted text to make Google believe they are legitimate blogs rather than spam
Legions of Twitter bots (automated accounts with an algorithm rather than a person generating their content) posting links to websites
Using bots or real people (incentivized by micropayments) to post high volumes of blog comments with links to the client’s site

This gives rise to a lot of misleading digital data, all of it only designed to be “read” by Google’s algorithm rather than human eyes. To a reader – or anyone tracking a brand – it is useless. The problem is that it’s got your brand name in it, so any generic brand-name social media search will bring back this “noise” too.

Challenge 2: unexpected content

Do a Google search these days and the internet seems an ordered and relevant place. Even when you search for an ambiguous word with several meanings – let’s say “Orange”, the results are sensible – Orange the mobile company and the Wikipedia page on the fruit.

This is because Google have spent years refining their algorithms to ensure it brings back the most relevant content possible. This doesn’t just mean putting the most popular links at the top of results. Instead Google uses everything it knows about you – your previous searches, your Google profile and Gmail, your stored cookies and more – to deliver personally tailored results.

Social media research tools don’t however work this way. The APIs and scrapers collecting content return all keyword mentions, relevant or not. In searches we’ve run, some of the most unexpected things we’ve found have been:

Searching for banks will bring back posts on “carder forums” – the sites where credit card fraudsters sell the card details they have stolen from databases.
Almost everything is a word in Indonesian. You thought you were searching a specific and unambiguous acronym? No, it also means something in Indonesian – and volumes can be enormous because Indonesians are one of the most active populations in the world on Twitter.
Pharmaceutical searches are near-impossible. Dubious medication sellers will include hundreds or thousands of drugs as keywords on their pages, whether or not they’re selling those products.

Challenge 3: not all relevant content is indexed

So far we’ve described some ways that irrelevant content or “noise” can get into your social media search. There’s also the opposite problem, however – not being able to ‘see’ certain types of social media content, particularly forums:

Message boards are part of the Internet known as the ‘Invisible Web’ and pose many problems to traditional search engine spiders. The dynamic content is usually very deep and hard to search. In addition, many of these sites change their locations, servers, or URLs almost daily presenting special searching challenges
[Boardreader]

This makes it essential to use a social media research tool that allows you to check which forums are tracked, and customize the panel of sources as needed.

Impact on social media research

What this means for social media research is that if you’re using an off-the-shelf monitoring package, you’re probably getting a lot of junk in your results. Brands are often keen on easy usability – type your brand name into the search, and get a volume figure and sentiment stats out. But without tailormade search syntax, those figures are almost certainly meaningless.

So how do you make your social media research search relevant?

1. Specific is better

Using broad search terms and then excluding keywords you’re not interested in doesn’t usually work very well. You’ll never be able to filter out all irrelevant content – language is too varied and dynamic. E.g. if you’re after the mobile brand, search for Orange AND mobile, not just “Orange”.

2. But you can filter irrelevant websites

Not that many big content farms exist – so we exclude everything from them by URL.

3. Also filter particularly spammy keywords

e.g. “Viagra” for anything medical.

4. Boolean search syntax

This is the logic that enables you to search for content including A and B, A or B, or including A but not B. It’s essential not only for designing your social media search strings, but for also searching within the dataset.

5. Test your search terms on Twitter

Enter your search phrases into Twitter Search to see whether you’ve got them right, or if they’re bring back unexpected or irrelevant content instead. Twitter search also helps you understand the volumes of content that’ll come back (is it multiple posts a second, or a couple per day?)

6. Get personal

If you’re specifically interested in what consumers are saying, searching with personal pronouns – e.g.“my iPhone” – will bring back a much more relevant dataset than “iPhone” on its own.

Which is to say, designing a relevant and accurate social media search can involve a surprising amount of time, thinking and ongoing refinement. Few brands have the time or expertise to do this in-house using an off-the-shelf monitoring tool. This is why our clients have come to us instead for our expertise in locating what matters in social media – the signal amongst the noise

24 September 2011

Identity architecture

Google Plus‘s real name policy has made it clear that they aim to be not just a social network but the leading identity provider for online activity.

Facebook’s Timeline can, I think, be interpreted as a similar move. As others have said it provides a structure that’s something like the personal webpages of 10 years ago gone interactive – a central place for the definition of “me” to be constructed, curated and broadcast. Again there’s a real name policy, although rather less vigorously enforced.

But this talk of their aims to become the leading identity question begs the question, how is identity provided online now, already? The answer (suggested the boy a couple of days ago) is email. In a world containing Jesse Owens (Olympic sprinter) and Jay Owens (blues musician), if you want to find me on social networks you can’t search my name, you need to search my email address. You have your email address on business cards – Twitter handle too, perhaps, but 140-char has to redirect to longer-form channels somewhere along the lines. What’s your log-in for most websites you use? It’s either an email address directly, or a username set up from reference to an email address.

And the cornerstone of this liberty is free, web-based email. Hotmail. Gmail, until recently. Mail.ru and Gmx.us and so on and so forth. This has not always been the case – email started out connected to your ISP (and thus subscriber details and physical address). Google are trying to take it back there.

So just something to bear in mind in the great squall of online identity debates. Free anonymous web-based email is not cool, or glamorous, and it’s easy to see how it could be threatened through recourse to anti-spammer rhetoric and Gmail perhaps one day privileging emails from real-name-certified accounts…

…But it’s something very important to defend.

22 September 2011

Performing identity in social media

[One written for the FACE company blog - hence the slightly different tone. Original story here.]

As we develop our online community research platform here at Face, we’ve been asking a deceptively simple-looking question. Should people have usernames, or real names, or some mixture of both?

It sounds trivial, but in fact design decisions such as this can have substantial impacts on how people contribute to online communities. Should participants use real names, as clients choose this kind of research to get in touch with “real consumers”? Or – as danah boyd and Skud (note names!) have argued – can real name policies be oppressive, as in the case of Google Plus? Might pseudonyms (a) help people talk more openly about difficult topics, and (b) be a more authentic representation of social media use in the wild, outside market research?

The bigger question here is one of identity.

Social media and social networks foreground this issue by the way that identities literally have to be written and created whenever we join a new group or network. Companies such as Facebook invite us to describe our identities within pre-defined categories – age, gender, location, favourite bands, favourite brands. Others such as Twitter, offer a 140-character blank box. Our updates and public messages then continue this process of producing an image of a certain kind of person – we tweet much more about things that make us look good than anything naff or mundane.

In an excellent blog post about this “identity work”, Jenny Davis (a PhD researcher in sociology at Texas A&M / @Jup83) concludes:

1) the social construction of identity is a laborious process;
2) the labor of identity construction must remain unseen; and
3) the architecture of social media asks us to present ourselves in explicit ways.
A tension is therefore created between the prevalence of interaction media which facilitate explicit self construction, and the appearance of a self, constructed through such media, that must appear to have organically emerged.
[Jenny Davis, ‘Identity Work and the Authentic Cyborg Self’]

A very interesting argument – but one potentially resting on two implications that need to be questioned:

1. How hidden is identity construction?
2. Are identity construction and authenticity really diametrically opposed?

Two distinctive features of digital life in 2011 are Lady Gaga, and self-branding blogs. Both seek to project a certain image in order to produce a particular reaction from people – fame and career success respectively. This method – “fake it to make it”, if you will – is backed up by the sociological concept of performativity.

Social theorist Judith Butler argues that our speech and actions (performance) produce what people understand as our identities and social norms:

Butler [explores] the ways that linguistic constructions create our reality in general through the speech acts we participate in every day. By endlessly citing the conventions and ideologies of the social world around us, we enact that reality; in the performative act of speaking, we “incorporate” that reality by enacting it with our bodies, but that “reality” nonetheless remains a social construction. […]
In the act of performing the conventions of reality, by embodying those fictions in our actions, we make those artificial conventions appear to be natural and necessary. By enacting conventions, we do make them “real” to some extent (after all, our ideologies have “real” consequences for people) but that does not make them any less artificial.
[Dino Felluga, “Modules on Butler: On Performativity” in Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.]

Butler makes the post-structuralist argument that the distinction between “real” and “constructed” identities is a misnomer – the ‘real us’ is something we perform and construct. Bringing this back to social media research, the question is how far might our research participants agree that the same is true for their online identities?

We can start by asking people what choices they have made in (a) setting up their social media profiles, and (b) in deciding what content to share on a daily basis. What may be most revealing is asking people what they choose not to mention – e.g. only mentioning your activity or location if it’s interesting and a bit braggable; not sharing links to the Daily Mail horoscopes (which you’ve actually been reading for the last 10 minutes) but rather a breaking piece of news about some new Silicon Valley start-up.

Every professional on Twitter, in particular, is making daily choices about the balance of personal and industry-relevant content they want to present. This is seen as normal and good practice, counter to the idea that the work of identity construction is supposed to remain hidden. This “conscious performativity” is most visible in the case of Lady Gaga – and legions of fame-hungry contestants on reality TV shows – who take calculated self-construction to an extreme, presenting conceptualised, mediatised packages where artifice becomes very much the point.

If people acknowledge the effort they put into presenting their online identities, what does this mean for authenticity? Empirically we can see that authenticity is still valued in people’s online identities – “self-branding” is fairly widely mocked (at least in the UK) for encouraging fake and pushy personas online. But how can identity be authentic and yet also constructed and performed? Why does Lady Gaga insist that she was “born this way”?

The issue is what we mean by “being authentic”. Being “made” is acceptable – what is at stake is the sincerity of our identities. Erving Goffman’s classic text on performed identities, The Construction Of Self in Everyday Life (1959), makes this point clearly:

“When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.”
[Goffman 1959]

An insincere or cynical performance violates the trust required for social interaction, hence its taboo nature.

Finally, it is important to note that we can be authentic in different ways in different contexts. For example, James is an honest man and also kind. At the funeral of his wicked uncle, he will not be honest about his thoughts about the deceased, in order to be kind to the feelings of the rest of his family. As Erving Goffman highlights, the performance is specific to the stage where it occurs – our identities are not socially universal.

To sum up, this results in a conception of identity departing from Davis’s:
1) the social construction of identity is a laborious process;
2) we are aware that this labour of construction occurs, and do not demand self-making to be invisible
3) nonetheless authenticity is still required, specifically in the sense of sincerity
4) authenticity depends on context

So what are the implications for online research communities? A few suggestions:

1. Participants need a space where they can determine the social context for their community and construct the appropriate identities. Researchers do this with initial getting-to-know-you tasks, asking people to introduce themselves to the community, but research communities don’t tend to offer much more than this – which potentially results in ‘thinner’, less fleshed-out identities and interactions between the group. Allowing people spaces to share “irrelevant” content, e.g. in status updates, general chat or personal blogs, provides the necessary space for people to build ‘thicker’, deeper identities – and also provides more interpersonal information to help participants come together as a community.

2. Should your community use an external ID provider, e.g. Facebook? No, as this will bringswith it a pre-determined social context that may not be appropriate for the community you’re trying to build. (e.g. LinkedIn IDs won’t get people in the right frame of mind for a community about parenting.)

3. In an ongoing community, let people choose and change their userIDs, display names and avatars between projects, as a way of helping them foreground the relevant social identity (e.g. as student, or mum, or twentysomething, or Italian) for the project at hand.

4. Clients may want to see “real names”, but this may not necessarily be the most appropriate and relevant identity to foreground – some social groups (e.g. video gamers, sports teams) are strongly nickname-based.

14 September 2011

Macro trends: black box algorithms & the end of the middle class

A couple of days ago I was thinking through the question, what’s important now? Or rather, what is now – what are the currents shaping the way the world is going over the next 10 or so years?

Perhaps this was inspired by Jon Henley’s article on September 11th, which argued that it wasn’t actually the “day that changed everything”, and many of the geopolitical events seen as consequences of the attack may have happened regardless.

One key trend is clearly black box algorithms:

In a speech at the technology conference TEDGlobal this summer, computer scientist Kevin Slavin argued that a profound shift is taking place: maths is undergoing a “transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it”.

The maths Slavin is talking about, and Harris is writing about, is algorithms. We are, he says, living in an “algo-world”. If Slavin is right, algorithms are shaping everything from the goods we buy to the value of the money with which we buy them.

[...]

The thing is, as systems of algorithms get more complex and take control of ever greater areas of everyday life, concerns are being raised over how much we’re able to track what they’re up to. The answer is: not all that much. As Slavin puts it: “We’re writing these things that we can no longer read.”

[Welcome to the algoworld, Sam Leith, Evening Standard, 12th Sept 2011]

Second, and bigger point – the stagnation and decline of the middle class standard of life.

Take a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Monday. The tale is nominally one about marketing strategy and it looks at how giant firm Procter & Gamble sells its household goods to its customers. But the picture that emerges is terrifying. P&G, it transpires, is cutting back on marketing to the disappearing middle classes, instead selling more and more to either high-income or low-income customers and abandoning the middle. Other big firms, like Heinz, are following suit. The piece reveals there is even a word for this strategy, helpfully coined by Citibank: the Consumer Hourglass Theory – because it denotes a society that bulges at the top and bottom and is squeezed in the middle.

The story contains some scary figures, such as the fact that the net worth of the middle fifth of American households has plunged by 26% in the last two years. Or that the income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998.

Or look at a story in the New York Times Tuesday. It starkly shows how the plight of the American working person has worsened. Solid jobs that once provided a secure grasp on middle class aims (a house, college for the kids, a retirement) have changed to become low-wage ones. It looks at the situation of some Detroit auto-workers, pointing out that new hires can find themselves working opposite long-term colleagues who do similar jobs yet earn twice as much. The system is called a “two tier” wage structure.

Perhaps that system can be justified as an emergency measure to keep Detroit’s auto-industry alive and help it survive the current tough times. But, like the Consumer Hourglass Theory, it actually looks far more like the permanent shape of things to come. American society is bifurcating, squeezing the middle class out of existence. The ranks of the poor and low-income earners are growing and the rich are doing just fine – and no one is talking about it, much less doing anything about it.

[The decline and fall of the American middle class, Paul Harris, Guardian, 13th Sept 2011]

More thinking on these later…