As much as I have fantasized about being a robot (not just growing up… like last week), the idea of having every interaction mediated by an interface that provides contextual data (accompanied by contextual advertisements unless you upgrade to the subscription service) sounds good in theory, but I suspect it would be absolutely soul-crushing in practice. As much as I feel one with both my laptop and my phone, I don’t want all my interactions to be mediated by an interface.

While I am sure the end game is to reach a stage where the C (computer) has all but been removed from HCI (human computer interaction), it will be interesting to see the path it takes. Are we reaching reaching a breaking point in terms of computer intermediation or will we continue to adapt to the point where the vision Matsuda presents or something similar is both comfortable and familiar?

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Next up, was Rebecca Sawyer from Facebook’s monetization team, which you can imagine was highly anticipated given how great the representatives Facebook had previously sent to Toronto had been and the fact that anything related to monetization of social networks (particularly Facebook) is bound to draw a crowd.

Unfortunately, Rebecca’s presentation turned out to be rather disappointing as she didn’t speak about how Facebook developers can monetize their applications (as many of the attendees, including myself, were expecting and hoping to hear) or even about Facebook’s monetization plans, but how effective Facebook Ads can be and how to set them up, but not even specifically in relation to applications. Needless to say, the crowd, which was about 1/3 marketers (who are all well aware of how Facebook Ads work) and 2/3 developers (who want to hear how they can realize returns on their investment in Facebook, not how they can invest more), wasn’t too impressed. Luckily, the crowd was given the opportunity to direct their ire at some weirdo who insisted on pursuing a senseless line of questioning about pornography in Facebook ads and applications. I don’t blame Rebecca as she was likely told what to present and did a pretty good job of it, but instead Facebook, who should of sent someone who could present content that was more relative to the audience, especially given the prominence of the Toronto community (Toronto is the world’s largest Facebook Camp). This may be due to the new profiles launching next week and f8 coming up soon, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

Following Rebecca, the Facebook no show continued as my coworker Andrew Cherwenka did an admirable job presenting the new Facebook profile based on a DVD that he was sent by Facebook from another Facebook Camp. I am not sure if it was the fact that everybody realized that nobody from Facebook was there to answer questions about it or if it was just Andrew’s charm, but I was somewhat shocked by the lack of reaction the crowd had to the implications that the new profile presents for Facebook application developers. For those that don’t know, all the applications will be relegated to a “Boxes” tab, one that I am sure that I and most other users will rarely look at, limiting one of the channels for viral spread of applications and removing value for those users that use applications as a form of self-expression. As someone who finds most applications to be junk, I like the redesign, but if I were a Facebook application developer, I wouldn’t.

After that, Refresh Partners introduced their Facebook application analytics tool, which I found to be fascinating and it looks to be an excellent tool, although I am a little skeptical of their claim to be able to provide a influencer rating for users (I imagine it is calculated primarily on number of friends, which in my experience is not really an measure of how influential a user might be).

Following that, three Facebook applications were demoed. The first one being Praize’n'Raize, an application that looks promising and pretty well made, but will likely have trouble luring users away from the Yelps of the world, but they do have a nice distribution strategy (multiple access points, open API) and a revenue stream in addition to the standard Adwords (they have refferal deals with Yellow Pages in Canada and Yellow Book in the US). The second application was Mouse Hunt, which looks like one of those Facebook games where you have to continually accumulate more of a digital commodity (similar to Mob Wars) by playing, referring friends and making purchases, which may be fun, but doesn’t have anything terribly innovative about it. The last one was Slang Book, which seems fun and well made, but again nothing Earth shattering.

Overall, I enjoyed the event, but was disappointed in Facebook’s poor showing and lack of support for a large community of self-organizing supporters.

Update: This morning I woke up to see Andrew’s Facebook status updated to “Andrew Cherwenka is thanking Rebecca Sawyer from facebook for setting the gold standard in post-garage q&a. Outstanding.” I guess I shouldn’t have ducked out of the post event social so quickly.

Since many users join Pages and Groups as a form of self-identification, the nomenclature that Facebook had used had limited the Page’s potential reach as a communication tool (yet another example of how much impact well or poorly copy can have on the user experience). For example, Vampire Weekend’s Facebook Page has 9156 fans, but only 249 wall posts, 132 discussion posts, 20 fan photos and 3 fan videos with the majority of those contributions coming from a small group of active fans. Assuming that the 8700 or so members who haven’t contributed have not joined for the band’s updates, it is safe to say that most of the members have joined the Page as a way of constructing their online identity/profile and signaling to their peers.

While this dynamic may serve to inflate Page numbers in some cases, it can be detrimental in others where the focus of a Page does not lend itself to users identifying themselves as fans. For example, if I were a high school administrator, it may be a good idea to consider creating a Page for my school, allowing me to effectively disseminate important information and get important feedback from the students and faculty while boosting the profile of the school. However, under the old fan definition, how many surly, image conscious teens would be willing to stamp on their profile that they are a fan of their high school?

This dynamic is the reason that Facebook changed the definition and by doing so effectively eliminating the only advantage that Groups had over Pages for marketers (I am expecting the Groups application to slowly die out or be merged with Pages). While this more general definition is a step in the right direction, why not allow the user to define their relationship with a Page or Group by selecting between a few categories (fan, advocate, hater, friend, coworker)? This would benefit the marketers that the Pages application was built for by providing them with more granular data on their product or brand’s status while enabling the users to more accurately self-identify.

Exclusivity
As I examined the levels of exclusivity (low, medium and high), I attempted to identify the divisions between the three levels and I came to the conclusion that there are actually four, which are as follows:

1. Open – These are communities that do not require registration in order to participate. Examples of these include message boards that allow anonymous posting and blogs that do not require registration in order to comment. To be honest, I can’t think of many brand communities that fall into this category as most marketers can’t resist collecting consumer information although you may be able to make a good argument for Facebook Pages and other similar social network groups to be included in this category as the brand creating the group has no ownership over any of the users’ data and many do not even require the user to join the page or group in order to participate.
2. Registration – These are by far the most common form of brand communities and require nothing from the user but registration.
3. Purchase – These are communities that require either the purchase of a product or a membership in order to join in addition to registration.
4. Outside Selection – These are communities where members cannot self-select themselves into the community. They must be selected to join by the organizer of the community or invited by an existing member. Communities in beta mode are excluded from this as their exclusivity is either an attempt to generate buzz or genuinely a function of technical limitations.

Interaction
As I attempted to define the lines between the levels of interaction with communities, it became apparent to me that the level of interaction is rarely consistent across all community members. Even in the communities where a certain level of interaction is required in order to maintain membership, there is always a huge spectrum between the users who are performing the bare minimum and the most active participants. As a result, it makes more sense for the model to become an explanation of the types of brand community members rather than the types of brand communities. In defining the differences between members’ interaction levels, I decided to use a pared down version of Forrester’s six categories of participation.

1. Spectators - This category could be considered a combination of the Joiners and Spectators in the Forrester model. These are people who will join a community, but will not contribute anything, preferring to consume the contributions of others without joining the conversation.
2. Critics – These members are people who will respond to discussion threads, tag content and post comments as well as ratings and reviews.
3. Creators – These members are nearly always the most active members of the community and contribute by writing articles (often as a way to start a discussion thread) and posting their own photos, videos or artwork.

Upon initial inspection, it would appear that now I am mapping traits of a community member (interaction) against traits of a community (exclusivity), but I would argue that the level of exclusivity of a community also represents the level of commitment on the member’s behalf prior to joining, with the only exception being potential members of an outside selection community. However, in most cases I would say that the influencer status required to gain an invite to those communities require a prior commitment far beyond a simple purchase.

Below is a diagram showing the intersections between the three levels of involvement and the four levels of prior commitment. The arrows indicate increasing levels of potential brand impact (both positive and negative). While it is fairly intuitive that a more involved member can do much more to boost or damage your brand, the level of prior commitment also corresponds to the level of brand impact because as the level of commitment increases, the exclusivity of the community increases, thereby providing each member with a higher degree of influence (both on and offline). For example, people are much more likely to listen to someone who they know owns a Harley Davidson (by virtue of their membership in that owners’ community) than an anonymous post on a Harley Davidson discussion forum or blog. Also, in addition to having more potential impact, I would expect community members to demand more involvement from the brand as they move upwards and to the right through the categorizations.

The above dynamic creates an interesting balancing act for those setting out to create brand communities. I believe most brand managers if asked would say that they would prefer brand community members in the upper right part of the chart., but before a brand sets out to recruit or create a community of those high impact members, they need to consider whether or not they are willing to devote the internal resources necessary to continue to feed the demands of those members and respond appropriately if a negative groundswell does occur.

Update: I should have taken a screenshot as it looks like the experiment is over.

I had been fairly interested in positive psychology since reading an article in the NY Times magazine a while back so when Jane began her keynote with a quick introduction to positive psychology, it immediately struck a chord with me. Jane went on to explain that the reason that there has been essentially a mass exodus of people who have chosen to disengage from the real world in favour of virtual worlds is that the multi-player games contained within these virtual worlds are in Jane’s words,”the ultimate happiness engine.” Elaborating, Jane explained the three factors that allow multiplayer games to be better at making people happy than real life:

1. Better Instructions – Multiplayer games have clear goals with specific avenues for advancement while providing users with the opportunity and means to effectively participate.
2. Better Feedback – Ever get caught off guard by some of the feedback you receive in your annual performance review? That doesn’t happen in the world of multi-player games. They provide dynamic, real-time information about your performance along with metrics that you can aspire to all within a singular, highly responsive environment.
3. Better Community -Multiplayer games provide a shared context for action and decision making coupled with a sense of common purposed, creating a foundational experience.

Jane went on to argue that there is no reason why we can’t learn from multiplayer games and try to transport aspects of their happiness engines into other systems, something Jane has attempted to do with her alternate reality games. This is a fantastic way to approach system design. As someone who regularly conceptualizes and prototypes websites and web applications, I am ashamed to admit that in my mind, a user’s happiness has always been tied almost directly to task efficiency. While I am certain that is a big part of it, we should be thinking about ways that we can increase the user’s engagement and sense of fulfillment beyond the completion of key tasks. One great example of how a web application can utilize multi-player game elements to create a more fulfilling experience is the way LinkedIn tracks your profile’s completeness, something a gamer would immediately recognize as experience points. I know several people who have obsessed over their profile’s completeness and have worked really hard to get it to 100% and I wonder how many other people have invested more time in LinkedIn (consciously or subconsciously) than they otherwise would have in order to receive the validation of a higher completion score. Jane also broke down the key traits that make muli-player gamers successful. They are as follows:

1. Mobbability – The ability to do real-time work in large groups or a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously.
2. Cooperation Radar – The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.
3. Ping Quotient – Responsiveness to other people’s request for engagement and the propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.
4. Influency – The ability to influence others.
5. Multi-Capitalism – Fluency in working with different forms of capital (eg. intellectual, social, financial).
6. Protovation – The ability to innovate in rapid, iteritive cycles, essentially lowering the costs and increasing the speed of failure.
7. Open Authroship – The ability to create content for public consumption and modification.
8. Noise Management – The ability to produce meaningful information, patterns and commonalities from multiple streams of data.
9. Longbroading – The ability to think in terms of higher level systems and cycles, to see the big picture.
10. Emergensight – The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and multiple levels of complexity.

In the same way that these traits enable players to succeed in games, they can also be used as indicators of what types of features can be incorporated into systems in order to encourage a higher level of engagement. I can’t help but notice that Facebook and other social networks tend to be more rewarding for users who are able to embrace the majority of the above traits. Given their ability to tap into the same qualities that are embraced by multi-player games, is it a surprise then that they have been so successful in capturing audiences over the past few years? While this type of thinking may not be applicable in many situations, I do believe that it is widely applicable and should be embraced wherever possible. As evidenced by Jane’s games, this multi-player game influenced thinking can extend well beyond the interactive realm. Imagine the potential power of some of these elements being introduced into gym memberships, blood donor organizations and public libraries, to name a few.

Also, her conversational interview style didn’t seem to work too well for him as she ended up talking far more than I think anybody would have liked to hear, leading to the mob uprising. While the way the audience reacted was not warranted, she reacted very poorly to the situation. If she had ignored them, the interview would have likely had a happier ending. Instead, she went on the defensive, lashing out at the audience and even her interviewee.

To make matters worse, in an interview she gave at a party shortly after the fiasco (nearly 40,000 views so far), she put the blame on not only the audience, but also the organizers, implying that what she was talking about was over the heads of the audience and that SXSW isn’t a good forum for someone of Mark Zuckerberg’s stature (funnily enough, he showed up and did an open Q&A at a Facebook Develop Garage the next day to some acclaim).

This dissolved all sympathy I had for her as her reaction to the situation clearly put her at just as much fault as the audience. Regardless of who was to blame this should have been the point where she apologized and admitted to having had a tough day, instead she insults the audience that includes a number of key influencers that could have a profound impact of the sales of her upcoming book. I wonder how her publishers reacted. I would love to know what their sales projections were for the book before the interview and whether or not they have shifted and in what direction.

Related Links
Full video of the interview
Sarah Lacy’s first article for Business Week in the aftermath (still unapologetic)

Bankrupt Your Startup in Five Easy Steps

This panel served as a good what not to do for people with start-ups by teaching attendees to “implode your company with style.” I found it to be a little thin in terms of content, but it was entertaining, especially after the unicorn hijacked/joined the panel.

Creating Findable Rich Media Content

I expected more from this panel, but not too much came out of it that you couldn’t have learned by digging through Google’s Webmaster Tools. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that Google is already fairly transparent about what factors impact site rank, so short of providing the algorithm’s used, there wasn’t much that could be brought to the conversation from Google’s end. There were however, a few interesting thoughts/threads that did emerge:

• Todd Nemet from Google pointed out that with the increasing adoption of technologies like RSS and widgets, the concept of search may need to redefined with the conversation shifting from how can users find your content to how your content can find your users. This is an interesting way to look at it, but I suspect the the majority of the tactics that would be used to make content findable will be the same ones used to enable your content to find the users.
• Richard Galvan from Adobe was asked about the metadata that Adobe’s products embeds in the files that they output. He responded that Adobe was working hard to allow program specific metadata to travel with files between the different programs within the entire suite to create better work flow, but wouldn’t elaborate much further than that. He also said that to his knowledge none of the search engines were using this information to index content, which surprised me as I was under the impression that wasn’t the case, but none of the other panelists disagreed.
• A question was asked about how Google would be using micro-formats to create richer, more contextually relevant and relational search results. Todd pointed to the experimental search stuff being done in Google Labs as examples of ways that Google was playing with the search experience. He said the key to taking the search experience to the next level would be the standardization and increased inclusion of metadata attached to non-text content.

The Contextual Web

Nick Finck from Blue Flavor discussed how we need to not only take into account the type of device a user would be using to access content, but also the context in which a user is using it. He identified the user’s environment, interface, display, task and skill level as the key components to consider. With the unprecedented diversity and constant evolution in user interfaces and contexts, I found myself thinking how unfortunate it is that the usability work on most websites is loaded onto the front end of the process when it should be an iterative process that continues throughout the lifespan of the site (something usability experts have been championing for years).

Rather than attempting to get it all figured out upfront through extensive research, we should be getting stuff in front of users and then reacting (shades of 37 Signals). With development languages, practices and frameworks getting increasingly agile and the analytics and metrics tools getting more sophisticated, I think we’ll see the cost of this iterative approach a point where it will become common practice rather than an infrequently used best practice.

Online Extremism – And the Muslims Who Fight It

I was hoping this panel would feature a broader range of perspectives (it seemed like everybody was on the same page), but I was impressed with the forward thinking displayed in some of the approaches presented. Frank Cilluffo, Director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute was talking about how the approach to deal with extremists online needs to shift from shutting down the channels of communication to using those channels of communication to engage the extremists. He spoke about enlisting prominent Islamic scholars to engage in these discussions.

This is exactly the approach I would advocate to any clients who are wondering how to deal with voices of dissent online. Shutting them down or censoring them should be avoided whenever possible as it will only force them to take their opinions to another platform where you may not be able to influence the conversation. You will also be missing the opportunity to hear their feedback moving forward. Take advantage of that captive audience to engage and respond to the dissent. Even if you don’t change the mind of the dissenter, you will likely be able to appease them and you may be able change the minds of those following the conversation. Sometimes all it takes to appease a disgruntled user/customer is for a company to say “Thank you for your feedback. We understand your frustration and are figuring out a plan to address the situation.”

Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?

This was an excellent panel that provided a lot of valuable insight into the difficulties in and some of the approaches to selling social media to all the major stakeholders in a company. However, the title was a little misleading in that none of the panelists provided what metrics or ROI models they are using on the campaigns they are running (beyond the usual suspects), which is largely a function of the fact that I think everybody is still trying to figure them out. Another interesting thread that emerged was how social media can be leveraged to increase to efficiency of the operations side of companies. The topics discussed here were both rich and deep and deserve a post of their own, once I have the time to unpack and organize my thoughts better. In the meantime, you can check out a partial transcription of the panel here.

Check it out:
http://thinkinginteractive.mofuse.mobi/

Apparently it publishes an iPhone version as well.

Update: I tried out the iPhone version (thanks Brian) and it is pretty slick, complete with those AJAX page transitions that scream Apple. Although you could just as easily open the site feed as it automatically displays in the Mac reader (without the slick transitions though).