I decided to layout a johari-esque matrix and filled in the blanks.

With Interesting results.

Each ‘window’ corresponds with a level of influence on the customer and  differentiation from competitors. They can be seen as follows,

1. The window of Due Dilligence

Areas where both the parties are privy to the wants and needs, it becomes a matter of due dilligence. Basic infrastructure and processes that need to be put in place becauseit is expected. The rules are clearly defined and demarcated for the most part and most companies in the mix would have most of these elements in place.

2. Window of Death by Irrelevence

Any company who stays too long in this space dies a slow death. Like we/ve always said, death, in Social Media isnt quick. It is teh slow death of irrelevance. As long as  a comapny isnt meeting the needs of the key consumers it loses relevance and eventually dies.  This is the key chalenge because marketing efforts are deliberate  while market forces, move by the power of the mass-effect. The collective tribe determines the worth of an endeavour. Companies need to be streamlined and quick enough to react to  shifts in market forces in order to be well placed when it tips. This requires keeping a close eye and finger on the pulse of the market.

3. Window of Opportunity.

This is where it gets interesting.

A situation where a company knows more about the needs of the consumer than the consumer does, it is always an opportunity to shine.

It is the Competitive edge, the USP and the Area of Differentiation from Competitors.

This is where the magic happens and where marketers live.

How then do we maximize this space while constantly working to minimize irrelevance?

K-Pop star Psy’s social media phenomenon has been taking the world by storm and the world has responded with a resounding “YES, WE CAN (Gangnam Style).”Here are a few lessons we can learn from PSY.

1. No matter what you do, do it with conviction.

“Do, or do not, there is no try.”

Watching Psy horse around is like a breath of fresh air.  One of the reasons Gangnam Style works is this, that he has absolute belief and a swagger that belies that conviction. There are no half measures, he does not make excuses nor does he apologize for it. He just does it.

2. Dress Classy, Dance Cheesy

When Psy met Britney on the Ellen show, he told her, “the mindset of this dance is ‘Dress classy and dance cheesy.’”

Its the convergence of different convergent philosophies. Classy and Cheesy don’t often dwell in the same space but the mash-up discordant dichotomy of Gangnam style allows it to cut through the noise and stand out.

3. Reduced Complexity increases Curve Jumping appeal

Gangnam Style consists of only 4 repetitive moves. They are distinct, simple and, as this clip shows, fun for all the family to pick up.

4.  let the tribe own it and they will help you promote it.

This is the age of the mashup.  Social media is no longer about passive  consumption but active participation.

As is well known, Psy didn’t copyright Gangnam Style. This allowed anyone to pick up the  track and do a remix or mashup  of it.  These remixes have  grown from a duck doing Gangnam Style to Acoustic versions. This allows the music to develop flavours and variations on its own and find its various expressions across tribes and cultures.

This in itself, ensures the longevity of the song and the popularity of, the original.

In this system, the collective consciousness, rather than being a single entity, represents the collective hopes, desires, dreams  and aspirations of the masses. This Hive mind also evolves as new frameworks are established, giving the individuals more tools to engage their reality.

this evolution is based, not surprisingly, on Language.

We depend on language to express ourselves and to  learn, discover and process infomation from the collective.

Imagine then, given the speed of transformation now, with the 140 character limit on twitter. Imagine  if each Tweet-er  had 140 words to express what they wanted to say, and that those 140 characters are read as easily as a short sentence. How would that change the speed of evolution?

Well, Welcome to the Chinese Social Media Landscape.

In a previous post, we discussed how weibo has a character limit of 140 characters. It seems arbitrary, and follows the twitter character count. however, 140 characters is equivalent to a paragraph in English due to the pictographic nature of the Chinese language and how meaning is derived.

So we have increasingly connected society, with the largest population in the world, speaking a common language, one that is able to communicate so much more efficiently than with our romanized alphabet.

What bearing does that have on the future of humanity?

Stay tuned.

It has been a source of great interest to me.  I came across this post in a forum not too long ago, to me, it represents much of what I have written about with regards to  the East-West divide.

” I never understood the need for people to eat with chop-sticks. Why would anyone want to eat with something so hard to use and unnecessary. Now, I totally understand people in China using them. I know they are cheap for them to use and when you don’t have a lot of money, that is great. What I don’t understand, is why would you purposely use it in a Chinese restaurant in America when they have forks. I am not trying to be a hater. I would really like someone to just explain to me why or what the advantage of it other than tradition or something like that. “ 

I couldn’t Help but respond.

1. Communal Eating: Chinese Eat communally. Traditionally, a family sits around a table, each with their own individual serving of rice, the meat and Vegetable dishes are placed in the center. Chopsticks allow one to reach food and to politely pick just the pieces of food one wants as opposed to just scooping.

2. Staples: In the Chinese culture, the staples are rice and noodles while in western cuisine, they are usually potatoes and bread. Each culture would have developed implements to most effectively consume what is prevalent. It is inherently more clumsy to attempt to consume a bowl of soup noodles with a fork and spoon and impossible with a fork and knife.

3. Cuisine: Chinese cuisine was developed around rice. Meat and veg dishes were meant to be paired with rice and hence are prepared that way. Chopsticks are the ideal implement for bring food to the rice bowl and then allowing that food to be consumed with rice. Chinese cuisine also has delicate foods like Tofu and Dim Sum which, were simply not meant to be clumsily prodded and pierced with a fork.

4. History: One has to remember that China and Japan were eating with bone china porcelain crockery and chopsticks for thousands of years while most western civilizations were still tribesmen eating with hands. The Cuisine has also developed over that time and that has lead to many of the types of food available in the west today. (see  pasta). Western cuisine developed from the medieval banquets with bread used as bowls and hands as the main implement to eat. forks and spoons were never ‘Fancy’.

5. Culture : There are 1.3 billion Chinese in China alone, and maybe 235 million in Japan/Hong Kong/Taiwan/Korea. The Population of the EU and the USA add up to about 800 million. 1,550,000,000 vs 800,000,000.  In Fact, the populations that use a ‘Fork and Spoon’ as the usual implement to to eat with are in the minority. This is of course not to say that it is better or worse, just to provide some perspective.

Due to the Great Firewall and the regulations about control, Twitter, Facebook,youtube and Google have been severely curtailed. However, nature abhors a vacuum, in China, that usually means someone will come in and copy. Which leads to interesting dynamics, as we shall see.

The twitter equivalent in China is, of course ,Weibo.

There are an estimated 300 million microbloggers on Weibo commenting on every aspect of life in China, taking part in political discussion and actually making a difference, as can be seen in the Train crash in Zhejiang, CHina in July 2011. Of course, These 300 million microbloggers blog in mandarin.

Now, Twitter is essentially a short message service, perhaps taking their length from the traditional length of an SMS, 140 characters.   In English, that means a short, one sentence update with a link.  Now,  in , Social Media and the Language of Culture, we discussed how  the Chinese language is pictographic rather than phonetic and meaning is derived from the characters themselves rather than the sounds. When the Chinese built their own version of twitter, they also set the limit at an arbitrary number of , 140 characters.

I decided to do an experiment.

In Honour of our National Day  next week, I have decided to use our Pledge as example text.

In English,  140 characters affords us sightly more than half of a single pledge, in Mandarin though,  there is room for 2.4  full pledges.

!40 characters in English is a short sentence, In Mandarin, it is a paragraph.

In English, it is a comment, in Mandarin, It is commentary.

Perhaps this is why microblogging is such a powerful tool in China,  meaning, inherent in that characters themselves communicate are able to articulate more depth and scope.

This has tremendous ramifications in Social Media and the ability of the tribe to communicate.

In our western tribes, we only have Guttural utterances when compared with the verbosity allowed by The Chinese language itself.

Collaboratively Creative Convergent Crowd-sourced Content Creation…

This is interesting to me because , the individual doesn’t exist in this equation . The motivation for creation of a shared meme, or  a pinned pinboard, is simply for the personal satisfaction of watching something you created up rise in prominence on the internet. The creation itself evolves through various iterations of crowd – curation until it takes on a life of its own.

Curation is democratized. The only measure of success is how many people deem your content  worth a chuckle and a click-to-share.

Where however does this concept of value come from? I shall attempt to put the questions down in this post. Its disjointed for sure, it is a thought process, hopefully, at some poitn we can make more sense of this.

1.     VALUE – If the creator is not known, can a piece of digital art be valuable in and of itself when disembodied from its social, pop-cultural , historical, geographical and perhaps even ideological framework. ?

a.     Does a high number of clicks or shares   validate the creator (Artist) or the art(created) ?

b.     or does the content(art) but a vehicle for the (valuable )input of the creator(artist) to represent what society may deem ‘worthy’.

c.      Or perhaps it is valuable only in its context, (cultural, historical, geographical, ideological) and is a cultural totem of sorts that serves as a representation of the state of the human condition at that place in that time….

2.     OTHERNESS – When one chooses a piece of created content(curates), i.e. I approve of and choose this content and deem it worthy,-  on what basis do I say it is ‘approved’?

a.     My willingness to choose a piece of content gives tacit approval to its ‘worth’ to me. However, does it implicitly have worth or does my approval somehow impute value into its existence.

b.     Do we critically view the piece of created content  from a personal framework of value or  do we need to take the posture of one looking in to someone elses(the artist) view of the world. Like the Lacanian mirror stage,  when one takes the place of an Other, looking in .

c.      Is Meaning related to its value? Or is the value of a piece of created work independent of the original meaning/inspiration of the creator? i.e. which modality? identification/alienation(I stand apart and view objectively)  or  recognition followed by assimilation  (I agree and buy in to …)

3.     The implications for  crowd sourced crowd curated content is that it is inherently disembodied, and ownership of the content lies with the ‘share-er’ rather than the creator.

a.     We derive joy from  being the first one to share a piece of content that has implicit ‘value’ to us.

b.     Since the creator is not known,  It essentially becomes ‘my’ share .

c.      It is valuable by being the ‘first’ one to share.

4.     What happens and what are the implications of the Other as Curator. And collective choices of the faceless crowd determines the value of  the art(content). ?

Business owners participated to get  more customers while customers eagerly searched Groupon for the best deals.

It was all about getting the best deal right?

Maybe not.

I would argue that a large part of the Groupon experience was the Gamified process.

It was fun, and one could watch the number of participants grow, and  get others involved till a critical mass was ‘achieved’ and everyone could enjoy the reward.

It wasnt always about the cheapest buffet or haircut,  it was also about being a part of something bigger and  playing a part in making it happen.

Exactly like a game perhaps.

More about the gamification of life to come…

Radio and Television programming helped an entire generation stay up to date with the world and the age of the telephone created the ‘Teenager’.

Human beings have an in-built need to  exist  as a tribe rather than as an individual. Right from the start, Technology empowered humanity to be more connected, communicate more efficiently, be more relational and more informed.

Every development of technology helped decrease the perceived distance between people and helped them be more connected as individuals as well as tribes.

With the state of technology in 2012, person to person communication is almost instantaneous. With voice and visual communication available for free in most parts of the world.

Technology continues to improve though, and  we are coming full circle where Once people changed their lifestyles in order to use technology in order for technology to help them be more human…

Now, People are  inventing technology that will  enhance the experience of connectivity while not requiring the user to change behavior or mindsets while connecting. Essentially,  reducing the barriers to communication and relating. In the course of this process, many devices were invented in order to allow humanity to interfsce with teh technology. These devices included remote controls, telephone handsets and computer mice.

In 2007, Steve Jobs announced the launch of the iPhone. Until that time, the primary means of interfacing with a mobile screen was with a stylus.

In the keynote, he announced that Apple was not going to use a stylus based control for the iDevice. The main input would be,

the Finger.

I was initially surprised as I felt the it would not be accurate  enough and hence would slow down the experience, i.e. adding more barriers and therefore  making it more difficult to engage.

However, as I used my iphone, I was pleasently  surprised at how ‘human’ the whole experience was. It wasnt perfect but it was intuitive, it seemed to pick up cues from what was being done and  respond accordingly.

The typing was  much maligned  but at perhaps 90% accuracy it was more  accurate than the majority of human interactions. The best part was that it was able to learn. Accuracy gradually improved as the phone learned about your typing habits. However, it was human enough to make little freudian slips as shown by DYAC.

Yes, Nokia’s autocorrect  functions were able to ‘learn’ as well but it was always a device  that required one to pick up signals with the eye, process, type with  fingers  and respond to words appearing on the screen. i.e. Non-intuitive .  The iPhone’s eye->screen->finger   process is so much more , Human.

This was not a ‘feature’ of the iphone, it was a fundamental basis for the design of the iPhone.  Steve Jobs mentions in another interview, “If you need a Stylus, you have already failed. That drove everything. “  ->  here

With one Masterstroke, Apple re-conceived the technology. They understood a fundamental human need to remove barriers from communication, did away with handwriting (which is learned) and brought forth an age of poking, pointing touching and dragging. All intuitive, untaught actions. This along with the ipad allowed us a glimpse into a new world of a tactile  web, bringing engaging technology closer to being human,  than ever before possible.

Times like this I wish I was an economist because I have been trying to get my mind around the value of money, the gold standard, ownership of virtual goods, virtual economies and personal payment methods.

I will be posting more about money over the next few days  but I would like to share this Visa Go ad that started me on this particular train of thought. It reminds me of my favourite bumper sticker “  My Karma Ran Over your Dogma” it works on so many different levels.

Enjoy, lets see where this journey takes us.

A well known brand,

A premise used by EVERY feel good Sports movie since time eternal, and you might  come up with this ‘designed for viral’ campaign.

It probably isnt ‘real’ and it plays upon many cliches in many ways but it has 4 million views in 5 days.

It has been said that “planning to go viral is like planning to fall in love”

This may well have been true before, however, as we all well know, money can buy a semblance of love and in this “designed for viral” campaign, It seems to work.

SO .. what are the formulas that work?