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Around Made by Many
I noticed a cool map on the AnalogFolk website recently, and thought it would be interesting to plot some of Made by Many’s favourite hangouts near our office too, in a quick-and-dirty way, with Google Maps. If you fancy popping in to say hello, these are some of the places we may take you to for a drink or lunch. Don’t forget to see our notes on them here, and if you have something to say about the map, feel free to comment on this post or on the map itself.
Here it is:
View Around Made by Many in a larger map -
Propagation Planning
Over the last year or so, one of the kinds of planning that I’ve been hearing more and more of is propagation planning. Propagation planning is planning that reaches a tier of people beyond those your agency directly connects with through its work, by providing a core group of people with material they find useful enough to spread on their own.
In the words of Griffin Farley, Strategy Director at BBH New York, “planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach, by giving them assets to propagate.”
Propagation planning has assumed increased importance lately because it puts influencers in the limelight, as opposed to assuming they are just another cog in the generic PR wheel, which encompasses multiple traditional offline PR elements as well as digital ones.
Word-of-mouth initiated by influencers is key to the success of any campaign or project, and propagation planning makes the spread of word-of-mouth a more researched exercise. I’d like to clarify two things here: one, that by word-of-mouth I don’t mean merely blogger outreach, which a lot of social media agencies do, and two, that by ‘influencers’ I don’t necessarily mean people who are big in the social media world – I mean people who are passionate, knowledgeable and who occupy positions of influence within niche communities. These communities will need to be selected according to the nature of your campaign (tech people, parents, artists, writers, movie fanatics and so on), and the strategy shouldn’t take a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
At Made by Many, we’ve made propagation planning a larger part of our work over the recent past. As I searched for relevant information about this discipline, I realised that there just wasn’t enough, and that what existed was dispersed across a number of places. Taking matters into my own hands, I decided to set up a wiki to document all these pieces of content, and Griffin kindly agreed to be a key part of it.
You can find the wiki here. Don’t forget to check out the sidebar with its different categories (including useful files and Slideshare presentations from Griffin). Comments, suggestions on information that should be included, and discussions about propagation planning itself are welcome here. I’ve kicked the first one off: how is propagation planning different from engagement planning and connections planning?
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Designing for Collaboration: Reward and Reputation Systems
One of my favourite talks at SXSW was by Andy Baio from Kickstarter, called Gaming the Crowd. Andy spoke about designing for increased participation through reputation systems. In fact, he killed the wonderful myth I had that leaderboards rock. Apparently they don’t, because if you’re not in the top 10, you’re disincentivised to participate.
Leaderboards aren’t always fun
There was a phase when I played Crazy Taxi (now called Crazy Cabbie) on Facebook and the mere sight of that leaderboard would make me grit my teeth and want to somehow beat whichever friend of mine was on top (I have since stopped playing it, having taken voluntary retirement from the game because I saw I was becoming obsessed, which is another thing Andy spoke about). The benefit there was that there were two kinds of leaderboards for that game – one that was relevant to you because it included your friends who were playing the game, and the other a global one which was really not much use because a) you didn’t know the people who had the high scores there and b) usually their scores were way higher than your top friends’ scores, so much so that there was no way you’d be able to get that far – so you didn’t bother. Or, in other words, it was disincentivising me, except I didn’t realise it at the time. In general, in MMOs, it is in the interest of the game to ensure people don’t burn out, according to Andy, and leaderboards often result in that, as they did with me.
Farmville, now the largest MMO in the world with 82 million players, taps some key behavioural psychology traits to keep players addicted to it. One, reciprocity. If you do something for someone, they are motivated to do something for you. Two, loss aversion. When you own something, even if it is virtually, some bit of you wants to see it prosper. Three, set collection. Many of us must have experienced this as children: collecting and bartering cards to complete a set, like Pokemon cards, or dipping deep into the recesses of my memory, WWF card sets (yeah, thanks to my cousins, I actually participated in trading pictures of wrestlers at one point!).Knowing when to step back
Sometimes the whole competition system gets out of hand. Andy mentioned the example of a lady who plays Xbox 360 who buys and plays games she doesn’t even like, just to beat people at them. Andy himself was part of a similar situation on Foursquare where a friend and he were locked in a competition with a third unknown person over the Mayorship of a cafe. They started resorting to checking in in the bathroom to get to the top, which really is a bit insane, as he acknowledged! (Overall though, he did say Foursquare had got the reward mechanism sorted out quite well).
Right and wrong reward systems
A key issue while designing games is to figure out how to make people happy. Games that use feelings of guilt to reinforce behaviour are wrong, and Andy gave a good example of a site that is really ‘evil’, as he calls them: Swoopo.

Swoopo is an auction site where every bid raises the price of an item by 12 cents, but also increases the time the auction will be open for by upto 20 seconds. So once you spend, say, $20, you’ll feel compelled to go on bidding to win the item because you will believe that it is right within your reach – and for every bid, the site makes money. They even have something called the ‘Bid Butler’ which places bids on your behalf! According to Andy, a site like Swoopo takes advantage of the inherent irrationality in human beings – of the gaps in the way we think.
Making fun part of everything you do
Someone in the audience asked a very interesting question after the talk: how can we make work more fun using reputation systems? Andy’s response was that anything that you measure – or teach – can be made into a game. Even something like editing a Word document. Imagine if you got points for every error you found in a Word document – wouldn’t that make you want to pay even more attention to what you were doing, rather than seeing it as a chore?
My favourite use of reputation systems and leaderboards in a work environment by far is the one that Panic Inc in Portland, OR have to display the status of their projects in-house. I so wish we had one as awesome as that here at Made by Many. Take a look:

One of the most valuable takeaways for me was this simple lesson, though:
Design your project in order to foster collaboration.
That should be the guiding principle. Think about how you can bring people together, and how you can do it in a fun way that makes them want to come back to your site/game.
Kickstarter is in itself a great example of that. It is one of our favourite sites here at Made by Many. Lovely, clean design, bold text, a clear indication of what is going on within different projects, and a motivation to go back and see how a project is faring if you’ve invested in it.

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A Few Quick Questions: Pete Cashmore at SXSW 2010
Right before South By, we sent a few SXSW-related questions over to Pete Cashmore of Mashable for him to answer. Mashable is one of the sites people both from within and outside the social media industry regularly refer to and read. In the 5 years since Pete founded Mashable in 2005, it has grown to gather a readership of 10 million unique users every month. Here’s what Pete thought of (and was up to) at South By this year:
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1. Has Mashable been at SXSW every year since 2005? How have you seen it evolve?
My first SXSW was in 2008. Since then the Interactive part has grown dramatically — that’s a great sign for the industry, but it also means it’s a challenge to meet all the interesting people! Interactive also includes a more diverse range of people now, including those who got into social media by way of traditional media, marketing or advertising. That’s great for Mashable, since that’s the audience we write for.
2. What is the one panel/session you definitely do not want to miss this year, and why?
I organized interviews and meetings throughout, so I unfortunately didn’t have masses of time for panels. However, I did participate in a panel on crowdsourcing called Crowd Control. We spoke about how media companies can add crowdsourced content in a way that adds value, and posed the question: “is crowdsourcing a fad, or will it change media forever?”. The audience voted overwhelmingly for the latter.
3. We’re sure you attend plenty of conferences and tech events every year. What makes SXSW special to the Mashable family?
SXSWi is the one place where everyone in tech comes together — people from all over the US, Europe, and even Australia and New Zealand make the trip. That makes it a melting pot from which the future of the web emerges.
4. Name one thing you’re sure will happen at Mashable’s MashBash this year :)
A geek dance-off in the early hours of the morning (and it did!).
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Thanks for taking the time to answer these, Pete! Hopefully we’ll see you next year.






