(image courtesy of gapingvoid.com)
An interesting piece by Andrew Walmsley in Marketing last week about how the internet narrows horizons, rather than broadens them, a thesis that has been kicking around for a while, but is nonetheless interesting to see in the marketing press.
The basic idea is that people, being naturally social, seek out those with similiar interests and opinions. We often characterise this as a good thing for branding and marketing as it allows us to tap into powerful community forces to help shape and propagate our messages.
But there's a downside as well. In his 1995 book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte introduced the idea of the Daily Me, a personalised newspaper, an idea which has always perturbed me. I find it perturbing beacuse of its potential to warp your view of the world. Want only good news? No problem, the world's a wonderful place. Not interested in foreign affairs? That's fine, just uncheck the box. And so on.
Now you can rightly argue that your choice of news outlet warps your view of the world anyway, and you'd be right, but the expansion of online access and the growth of social media has lead, some argue to 'echo-chambers'. Online forums where people go to have their own views reinforced and played back to them by others. This behaviour is what narrows horizons - views become more entrenched and more extreme, leading to the ill-fated attempt to impose a code of conduct on bloggers in 2007 (which would never have worked anyway, but is an interesting symptom).
What does all this mean for us. Three things:
1. My crowd, my wisdom
The wisdom of crowds, crowd-sourcing, wiki-nomics and so on are as established as anything can be in 'Web 2.0'. But the notion of echo-chambers runs completely counter to this view. If, increasingly, your 'crowd' is people who agree with you, however batty your views, the notion of collective wisdom becomes a nonsense.
A great, and often amusing, example of this in action is the idea of 'poll crashing' or 'freeping'. Biologist (and atheist) PZ Myers is a famous proponent of this via his excellent blog Pharyngula, from which he mobilises his significant readership to participate in 'pointless polls' on creationist and religious topics and sites, thereby skewing the results away from what the authors originally wanted to 'discover'. He's even made PBS in the US about it.
So, bear in mind that the wisdom of crowds may not be as wise as it seems (and certainly won't be if you're polling creationists)
2. Getting influence to jump
Another challenge we face is how to get the influence of these small, committed groups to influence wider behaviour. In other words, how we get beyond the echo-chamber. It's a difficult one, this, but is the big role that brands can play. It's here that understanding motivation is important - are these groups motivated by fame, shared goals, a desire to learn or look clever? Understand this and you can structure a way of rewarding people for their participation.
These insights have been very astutely used by our PepsiCo clients in their recent groundbreaking campaigns for Doritos and Walkers.
3. Don't stop exploring
Don't get stuck in an echo-chamber yourself. Or, if you do, at least recognise it. Stuff we've talked up before, like iGoogle and bloglines, can mean you fall into exactly this trap by reducing your online consumption to the handful of feeds that appear on your homepage. It's a daunting one this, but if you don't know where to start, try StumbleUpon. Works for me.
Keep yourselves fresh.
-- Toby
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