At Made by Many, we love playing with – or at least trying out – a lot of the new apps and sites that make their appearance on the web. Now admittedly Posterous isn’t *new*, but we’ve been giving it a go off and on, with the aim of deciding how best to use it, and how best we can use it in a way that is different from what we write here. The result: we’ve decided to make it a visual repository of the stuff we see, like, read or otherwise discuss about the web. We envision it as a sort of Oddbreak for geeks. So if you’ve got some time on your hands and you can’t be bothered reading long blog posts, just head to the Made by Many Posterous! You may want to add it to your bookmarks too.

Last week, I went to a rather interesting talk at the LSE titled ‘How Would a Robot Read a Novel?’. I was introduced to a software, primarily used in the social sciences, called Alceste (note: this, and many other sites I’ve linked to in this post, are Google-translated pages, from the originals which are in French. There seems to be surprisingly little about it on the web in English). What Alceste does is look for repetitions of co-occurrences of words over a large volume of text to assess patterns. In the social sciences, it is used (still in only a few places, and in a limited number of cases at that) to detect instances of bias in surveys. Research has apparently shown that when words occur in the same pattern repeatedly, it is rarely random.

Alceste doesn’t understand meaning, and makes no pretenses about trying to do so. It was created by Max Reinert of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and is now marketed by a company called Image that holds all rights to it, from what we were given to understand.

Anyway, now that I’ve given you the context, let me move on to explaining what was really interesting about the talk. Dr. Kavita Abraham, a researcher at the LSE’s Methodology Institute, used Alceste to analyse a novel called the Kilburn Social Club by Robert Hudson. It is worth noting here that when Alceste was introduced as having been used to assess some literary works earlier as an experiment, members of the audience were easily able to identify the books as being Oliver Twist and Moby Dick. With the Kilburn Social Club, Dr. Robert Hudson (a history academic-turned-author) admitted that Alceste’s analysis matched the pattern of the story he started out intending to write, in that the words used were seen as generally being grouped around 4 themes (16% descriptive, 12% football, 22% finance and 50% relationships). So it could be used, hypothetically, during the process of writing to ensure that a book wasn’t skewed heavily in one or the other direction.

Dr. Hudson clearly meant ‘hypothetically’, though, because the truth is, as we discussed after the talk, we don’t really need Alceste to tell readers about patterns in books. Why would you want to reduce a work of art to a mere jumble of statistically co-relating groups of words? People read literary works FOR that element of bias (I think James is writing a post about how opinion – bias, if you must – is in fact often not given the respect it deserves in today’s world). A quote of Mark Twain’s was proffered by one of the panel members: ‘A classic is something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read’, but I’d argue that at a stretch you can extend it to summarizing business books  – the way Kevin Duncan does on his blog, for example. It’s useful to time-starved people who want to be able to speak intelligently about a book and learn the distilled lessons from it, but who don’t have the time to wade through it in its entirety. You just can’t do that with novels, though! Here’s an example of how Alceste summarized that potboiler of potboilers, The Da Vinci Code. It’s quite a laugh.

One of the issues that was left simmering in my mind as I left the venue is that there are so many technologies we’re introduced to on a daily basis that many of us perhaps do not really question the need for – probably even more common in the case of clients. Is ‘I want a social media’ really still an accepted statement?

Google Buzz is being debated upon as either a highly intrusive or potentially highly social application, while right here at Made by Many we’re arguing the benefits of using Yammer at work versus plain old Twitter. The question isn’t what we can do with it, as in the case of Alceste, where it has been accepted that it is really only useful to the social sciences because that discipline is based on the removal of bias. The question is do we need it at all?

(A PDF of the talk, for those interested, is now available here).

1. Star Wars Action Figures Doing What They Do Best: At Made by Many, some of us have a bit of an obsession with Star Wars, and that includes someone like me who isn’t a great fan of the movie series but is immensely amused by the entertainment that comes from objects based on them, like the Lego Death Star (only £274.99) and this website.

2. Unhappy Hipsters: Why do people look so sad in Dwell magazines? This is one of the most creative things I’ve seen lately! So much for picture-perfect homes. We live in the REAL world, people!

3. This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post: You know what they’re like – they end with sentences that do this:

Excerpt:

This sentence invites readers to respond freely and without constraint as long as those responses fall within certain parameters. This sentence consists of an Internet in-joke that doesn’t quite fit the topic.

4. MagCloud: Publish your own printed magazine. Can this help to revive the dying art of print journalism?

5. LG Unveils Flexible Electronic Newspaper: It’s a newspaper. It’s electronic. And it bends!

6. Simply Noise: Some people NEED noise. For reasons like enhancing privacy, going to sleep, blocking distractions, masking tinnitus, configuring audio equipment, and soothing migraines, among others. No, I didn’t make those up myself.

7. Where Does My Money Go?: You’re a taxpayer. (If you aren’t, kindly proceed to the next item in this list as this will not be of use to you). Don’t you want to know where your money goes, in an understandable way? For the layman (i.e anyone who isn’t a chartered accountant who wants to entertain himself by digging into the details where they are likely to find worms), this data visualization is a rather useful glance at what’s happening to their hard-earned bits-of-paper-with-Queen-Elizabeth’s-head-printed-on-them.

8. Inbox Zero: Merlin Mann is writing a book about ‘how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life’, and these photos are related to that. I think.

9. The Nerd Venn Diagram: Are you a geek, dork or dweeb? (via Laughing Squid). I always liked Venn diagrams in school.

10. Microsoft Office, Version Bland.0: A designer re-imagines the Microsoft Office logos. Worth a quick look, for some design entertainment.

11. Next Nature: Because this is a beautiful-looking blog that has an ambitious task. What exactly does it mean, I hear you ask:

Next nature is the nature caused by human culture. That may sound like a contradiction, but really, it isn’t. Our technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. This means we have to re-investigate our notion of nature.

12. Sleep Talkin’ Man: Because it is HILARIOUS. And we like laughing here at Made by Many. It increases our life span.

13. Amanda Wachob Tattoo: If you’re considering a tattoo, you may want to look at her work. (We’re a bit rad like that).

14. The Feltron Annual Report: Most of you have probably seen this already, but for those who haven’t, I’m sure you’ll find the intricate details of Nicholas Feltron’s life interesting. OK I’m kidding – it’s visualized in a very detailed way as well.

15. Slam Ball: Words cannot describe this new sport that seems to have been created by combining basketball with the trampoline.

That’s all for now, folks!

Bart De Waele from Netlash made this presentation on old vs. new media recently. You can see the whole thing for yourself, but I wanted to mention a few things that stood out for me:

The comparison of old vs. new media to Jesus vs. the jester. Some people are trying to be the Next Big Thing when all they really need to do is light a few small fires. Making people laugh is sometimes an ability that is highly underrated.  It doesn’t HAVE to be an Avatar. A Juno will do quite well.

The power of real-time search and the shift from algorithm-based to social-powered search. More and more, I see friends asking for advice on Facebook about things they’re considering buying, so I agree with this.

The power of digital curation. When it comes to news, we don’t want to search for the news, we want the news to come to us – one of the many reasons why people use Twitter. Twitter hasn’t perfected the art yet, and Google News and others offer no way of serving up just what we’re looking for – I still wade through a lot of trash to get to the news that interests me. There’s a big role for digital curators in the future, as Bart says. Piers Fawkes at PSFK wrote a good post about what the future of blogs may be, and received an overwhelming response affirming the role of digital curators. However, Peter Rojas, publisher of Gizmodo and Engadget, made an interesting point when he said:

…….when I thought about what I wanted to do after Engadget I realized that there was something really interesting happening with the web — it was becoming more social, more dynamic, and more real-time, and I wanted to try and build a gadget site built around those ideas rather than one predicated on a team of editors cranking out posts.

I think FriendFeed went some way towards this, but it didn’t quite crack the code. I want to see things that interesting people (like some of the people I follow on Twitter) read and share on the web, but I don’t want to see comments of a personal nature they make to other friends (which includes personal stuff they share on Twitter, for example). With Google Reader I can ‘follow’ some people who choose to share their items with me, but I find that a lot of those items are from sites that are in my feed reader anyway. There’s a problem of duplication there, in other words. I think I’m describing a purely news-oriented Twitter – a sort of Google, FriendFeed and Twitter mash-up, where you follow people you want to, and get the content they’re into, on a real-time basis.

Another interesting comment from the PSFK post was:

It is endlessly frustrating to find a post that you put hours of loving care into get 1800 page views, and then throwing up a timewaster on LED encrusted eyelashes gets a hundred times that because of the power of DIGG.

There is nothing wrong with the medium of blogs, the problem is how the for-profit sites monetize it. That is why I think Fast Company and Atlantic are doing such a good job, they are bringing the discipline and editing of good magazines into the blog world and, I think, with their professionalism, will eat our lunch.

Now that is something that media outlets need to decide for themselves. Professionalism is a good thing. If the problem is the big supermarkets eating the small independent corner-shop, or the Fast Companies of this world eating smaller blogs, then the situation is the same as it was when globalization happened in South Asian countries like India years ago – some Mom and Pop shops died, but some didn’t. Sites like Unchained Guide are proof of the fact that there are plenty of independent boutiques that I personally would much rather patronise than H&M or Topshop in the UK, for example. Besides, if your blog is good, or popular (which is arguably more more important, from a monetization point of view), you may even get bought by a conglomerate, like Mashable is rumoured to be by AOL (whether or not the $15-25 million valuation is justified is a different issue altogether).

It’s called creating a niche for yourself.

I submit, however, that it IS irritating when sites like Digg give silly posts undue attention – I’m skeptical of the kind of people that use services like Digg in the first place. Taking this a bit further though, it would be useful to have a  Digg-type vote up/vote down functionality on the mash-up service I described above.

Today, London saw its first snowfall of this winter season. As the white powder from the sky changed into sizable, more distinct flakes of snow, everyone in our office got excited and many (including me) moved to the windows for a few minutes to witness it. Now, on one level, it isn’t anything special, but on another much more wide-ranging level, there’s something about Nature’s magic that draws everyone to it – that makes people go ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’.

I guess most successful social media projects have that special something that draw people to it again and again in the same way. It’s about what they can make people feel. Twitter makes me feel like I’m part of a huge community of people, many of whom share different interests of mine. Facebook makes me feel connected to my friends and family. Songkick makes me feel like I’m part of this music community, some of whom live on music even more than I do, and Dopplr makes me feel like I’m fulfilling my desire of going to new places.

UK Snow has hundreds of people tweeting right now about how much snow they’re seeing in their part of the UK. It’s a fairly simple app that Ben Marsh created during February’s blizzard this year, and it’s probably a go-to site on days like this, when the snow makes everyone go ‘Ooh!’

Because on those days, a site like that makes us feel like we’re part of a snow community of sorts.

Sounds silly perhaps, but given the fact that as I type this, #UKSnow is a trending topic, perhaps not.

Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes from MIT gave TED attendees this year a demo of the Sixth Sense, a wearable device with a projector that helps us interact with our environment, which is shown in one of the final slides of this presentation. I can’t help wondering where the next evolution of a product like Sixth Sense will take us – currently it allows us to interact with our environment, but maybe one day we can interact with our friends in a similar manner. This Nokia Augmented Reality video is one version of such a world:

What do you think? What will our personal platform be like in a few years’ time?

I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.

Assessing necessity

Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.

Defining engagement

Defining what engagement means to you as a brand at the outset is important. Is it having a certain number of comments? Getting people to contribute ideas to a wiki? Making sure they spend x amount of time on a site? It is only later that the ‘how’ of engagement should come into play. The answer to ‘how can we measure the impact of our website/community’ can only be given when you answer ‘what exactly am I looking for’ first.

Areas of engagement

If brands do engage online, where they engage is more important than how many places they are active online. I’d rather pick my battles (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for example) and fight them well rather than have my social finger in too many pies (all the above plus MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut etc.) and not be able to have meaningful conversations with anyone.  Of course this depends on where your audience is. They could well be in Second Life and Vimeo, and if they are, then that’s where you should be – not Facebook. (more after the break)

ROI

If brands do engage with customers online, the relationship with their consumers cannot be selfish: yes, they are investing money in creating a service, but they should think of it more as an investment than a cost. If their users/customers didn’t exist, they wouldn’t exist either. Therefore as much as they’d like to know what their ROI is (ultimately increased sales), they should consider what their audience’s ROI is going to be as well. Whether it is freebies, cash or a cut of the profits, or something that helps them validate their relationship with the brand: a widget, a button etc. Thinking of a value exchange right from the beginning is essential. Rick Liebling has done a bit of thinking on this, and if you’re not familiar with consumer ROI as a concept, it may be useful to read his posts on the topic.

Recognising that everything is not digital and not quantifiable

Not all interactions are quantifiable. For every #bosewatcher there may be completely satisfied Bose customers who chat about their experiences in real life instead of online. Technology helps us become more efficient – more brands are on Twitter now because it helps them speak to customers who are on Twitter. It doesn’t mean ALL their customers on Twitter. But if they weren’t on Twitter, then they wouldn’t be able to control the damage that unhappy customers can wreak on the brand, or talk to people who are curious about the brand.

We aren’t built of technology. It is merely a means to an end.

Means vs. end

It is important to distinguish the means from the end. Metrotwin is a service that helps people find the best of London and New York and Metrotwin Mumbai is a blog that captures the best of Mumbai and London. They are the means to an end: which is to get more people travelling between New York and London, and Mumbai and London – more satisfied people. That is down to the flight experience, and that is a function of the brand itself. It is very easy to confuse the two, as Dan O’Connor postulates here.

Methods of engagement

There are different ways to engage online, the most popular being

-       Community-building: Protect The Human, Metrotwin, or Dell Communities are examples.

-       Crowdsourcing: MyStarbucksIdea and Dell Ideastorm are examples.

-       co-creation: Lego Factory, and open APIs are examples. Note that this differs from crowdsourcing in the sense that in crowdsourcing you get people to contribute their ideas with possibly no reward in return, and no guarantee of the contributor’s ideas being used (MyStarbucksIdea or Crowdspring are examples of this), whereas when you co-create you actively solicit the user’s contribution in a product.

-       co-financing: Kiva, Vittana, and Kickstarter are examples.

Agile services that are open to engagement

The best services to foster engagement are agile ones that are constantly open to feedback and change. This requires a willingness to include users in the process of improving the service (and ultimately the business). The methods of engagement outlined above are examples of ways in which this can be done.

Building a core user base

The best way to ensure a minimum level of take-up of a service is by building a core user base before launch. Burberry did this by creating Art of the Trench to tap into their core base of 700,000+ Facebook fans and giving them a way to engage with the brand in a better manner. Brands who do not have that critical mass need to define what the critical mass is for them, and be assured that the mass will engage with the brand via the service when it is ready. Burberry didn’t need to email each one of their 700,000+ members (they had enough pre-release coverage in online and offline publications), but smaller brands may need to. The ideas of propagation and engagement need to be built into a service from the beginning.

Targeted communication

Speak to the people who are open to being spoken to, or those that want to be spoken to. This is where digital markedly differs from traditional mass advertising. The latter simply aims at as many people as they can reach (though we are all aware that media buying is a whole industry of its own, and a vast one at that), and is not overly concerned with engagement, because there is no conversation mechanism – that’s why traditional advertising is typically called ‘one-way’.

That has changed with digital, which needs to target a much more carefully defined audience and needs to ensure some level of engagement (i.e, it has to be ‘two-way’) – because it is much easier to measure (i.e elements like pageviews, visitors, number of comments etc., via simple tools like Google Analytics or more detailed paid services such as those provided by companies like Comscore or Radian6).

The impact of influencers

It is impossible to ignore the impact of key influencers – and their sphere of influence can span both digital and offline. This is the simple reason for the increase in the number of social media agencies whose business it now is to reach out to these influencers.

Brand engagement vs. consumer engagement

Measuring the level of engagement a brand has with their audience (as, for example the Altimeter Group’s EngagementDB report does), is different from measuring the levels of engagement a consumer has with a brand. Two measures of consumer engagement immediately come to mind: commenting, and time spent on a site. As opposed to, for example, pageviews or uniques, because people could click on your site and close it the very next second and that would be quantified – but that’s hardly engaging is it?

Quantity vs. quality

So, ultimately, which is more important – quantity or quality? There has been a marked shift of late in the discussion of the measurement of social media to the discussion of engagement. The fact that digital interactions are important has been proved enough for me to accept the logic – via research like Millward Brown’s BrandZ report which says that ‘digital consumers have a 15% stronger relationship with a typical brand’, or the Razorfish FEED report, which found that ‘64% of consumers report making a first purchase because of a digital experience’.

Which leads to the shift in focus from mere measurement to engagement. Measuring conversations online can be done, and I don’t think the basic metrics (pageviews, uniques, number of members/fans) needs to be vastly improved upon. It’s engagement – and sentiment – that we need to crack. Engaged users are more valuable than mere numbers, because you cannot guarantee that those people will always return if they are not engaged. And without engaged users, no platform will be sustainable.

Agreed, it is difficult to, for example, measure the value of conversations at a party, but you can figure out who you enjoy talking to more. You’ll see people hovering around them. They are the influencers. Similarly, in a community, engaged users will contribute more. Those are the people to focus on – the influencers, and the engaged. You have the beginnings of a solid community right there – and then it will grow.

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I’d like to acknowledge the following people for their own posts, comments on my earlier posts or their feedback, which have helped me pull this together: Jared Gruner, Patricia McDonald, Dan O’Connor, Mike Arauz, Rick Liebling. From Made by Many, William Owen, Justin McMurray, Mike Laurie and Tim Malbon.

All this leaves me feeling there is a real and significant opportunity for brands to excite and inspire again through storytelling. That it is possible to reinvent a lost art, rather than dismiss it. That storytelling can be a powerful tool to drive new creativity in the interactive space.

I just came across this presentation by Helen Klein Ross, who heads a company called the Brand Fiction Factory, that made me think of the the Labs post in the first place. Helen is the voice of @BettyDraper on Twitter, and the presentation summarises how Mad Men has successfully used (and continues to use) social media to keep fans enthralled even as it is into is third season.

For some reason, I kept re-reading the definition of brand fiction as put forth by the Brand Fiction Factory on their website:

Brand Fiction is original narrative and mythology built around a brand’s unique promise.  Brand Fiction is valuable not only as a marketing vehicle but as pure entertainment that can ultimately be franchised. Brand Fiction brings a brand to life in a way that validates and encourages consumers to create a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the brand, turning prospects into enthusiasts who spread the brand story.

I know a lot of people mention the Meerkat as a success story in social media, but to be honest, the character does not a) bring a narrative to mind, and b) isn’t meaningful in any sense, so for me doesn’t do much. To the end that it brings up the brand (i.e Comparethemarket.com), it is successful, I’ll give it that. But as a STORY that truly channels a tribe (never mind Aleks the Meerkat’s 600,000+ Facebook fans), that is long-lasting and emotional, it does nothing. So if you’re thinking of mentioning it as an example of creativity in the interactive storytelling space, it doesn’t count. Mad Men, as you can see from the presentation, has gone as far as organising an event replete with Eventbrite tickets and ’60’s-style prizes, through which they’ve got a database of fans’ details. The over-arching idea is that the characters take the show from season to season.

I see a clear gap here, which places like the Brand Fiction Factory are probably going to fill. I’m not sure how easy it will be to execute for a brand as opposed to a media channel like a film (Watchmen) or a TV series (Mad Men), but I see that as a surmountable challenge. What is absolutely mandatory though, is a very courageous client. That, and patience. Easy asks? Perhaps not, but with the way social technology is breaking new barriers almost every day (if you are a digital native, you’ll understand what I mean), I think it’s just a question of that client finding the courage to  say ‘Yes’.

Now obviously there could be issues if a post is not keeping with the general tone of a blog, but if the publisher does this on the brand’s behalf, it’s a win-win situation. Obviously there will be critics but hey, there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. Running a website isn’t completely without its costs.

One thing I can tell you as a reader of multiple blogs is that I just gloss over banner ads. They’re almost invisible to me. This particular Apartment Therapy post isn’t the best example, but if a post was particularly witty and just happened to be sponsored, you’re not going to get me complaining at all. It’s all about engaging the reader. Banner ads are an example of one-way communication and are definitely not engaging. A blog post, on the other hand, can tell a whole story.

In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you’ll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed. If you’re curious, you can read more on our Google Research Blog about the infrastructure we use for ranking all entries in real-time.

Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

I think this is really the beginning of something very powerful for the social web.