Strategies for success on Facebook

Came across a great post on Facebook applications and why they do or do not succeed. Rodney Rumford uses a recent campaign by Sony to draw attention to mistakes that are easily avoidable. The shameless plug for his own company is a bit much, but if I were in his shoes I would probably do the same!

"Rule Number One: Brands Need To Understand the Facebook Ecosystem & Why Applications Are Successful."

It's short and well worth the read.

Borders to Amazon "Please take our customers, we don't know what to do with them"

I've just spent the last 10 minutes sitting on the phone, it ringing and recorded messages being played ad nauseum, some kind of old world punishment for wanting to do something as banal as actually enter a brick and mortar bookstore. If it was the mum and dad run place down the road that would be fine, but then again they would be closed by 6pm at the latest, so I should count by (mixed) blessings.

Borders, listen.  I know you're trying to get yourselves sold, but you have to make yourself attractive for that to go down. What patronage you currently enjoy is not going to grow if you do not make it easier for me to transact with you. It should speak volumes that I'm actually willing to go into a store to get what I want and not order it from your friends across the pond. I'm not asking for the bar to be any lower than it was twenty years ago, I want you to pick up the phone when I call. If that is too hard, then I have some unfortunate news regarding your remaining ambitions...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan

I had thought that when I got to the end of the afore-mentioned book I would review it and post my thoughts on it, however it seems every few pages there are a raft of new ideas, ones that suggest new trains of thought, undo previous ones, and generally beat you over the head should you be caught sleeping. The book itself is more essay than anything else, but I mean that in the best possible way. Personally I had never heard the word vitiate before (it means to reduce or impair the quality of, just FYI...), which is a challenge in itself, but it certainly isn’t the kind of book you start reading if you’re not up for an exchange of big ideas. 

So, rather than wait until the end and try to disseminate what I’ve learned, I thought I would use this blog as a place where I could dump my thoughts for the day, a reading diary and would serve as the notes I’ve taken along the way. I’m not quite half way through, a page into chapter 9. If you haven’t read it yet don’t worry, there aren’t spoilers to be had, and I welcome the thoughts of anyone who cares to share, whether you’ve read the book or not.

The idea that is sticking with me most right now (and that could be because I just finished a chapter on it) is referred to as silent evidence. Taleb uses a myriad of examples of this throughout the chapter, I’ll relay a summation of what gamblers refer to as “beginner’s luck”. Simply put, if a thousand people sit down and start gambling, odds are that one among them will strike it better than any other because of the unpredictability of games like roulette. There will be no rhyme or reason, and 999 people may go back to what they were doing.

That one person though will continue to gamble, convinced their success has been preordained, the silent evidence of the other 999 you won’t find out about, because their experience gave them nothing to share. The notion of beginner's luck exists because you only hear about it from people who experience it, not the vast majority who lose their money and leave, thus giving the false impression that all people who start gambling kick it off with a string of lucky breaks.

In the book, Taleb warns against forming opinions on events based on the evidence directly presented. He is far more concerned with the statistics that aren’t being told. If a drug came out that cured cancer but potentially also killed 1 in 10 people, a doctor would never prescribe it; the potential law suits would make it an untenable position.

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote.” (pg. 112)

A previous point he had made along those lines was a fictional account of two men flying to New York, one a local, one planning to visit Central Park for the first time. The local gets drunk and regales the visitor with a stor about how his wife’s brother’s co-worker’s 2^nd cousin’s nephew had a friend who was mugged and killed in the park, leaving behind a wife and two young children. The visitor could be greeted with a myriad of statistics espousing the safety of walking through the park, but in all likelihood would be consumed with the image of a man lying in the park, bleeding to death, and a family with no husband or father.

As in the cancer-curing drug example above, anecdotes are much more powerful than statistics.

I could cite a dozen more pieces from the book where Taleb paints a compelling argument for the Black Swans, however it really is worth your time reading it yourself. If you want an overview, stay with me over the coming week or so as I move through the rest of it. As I said above you need not have read the book to share your thoughts on the ideas; one of the first points he makes early on is the best and most disruptive ideas often come from people unaware of the rules of the game.

More as it arrives…

Is a picture still worth a thousand words?

Being back home for Christmas is always a great opportunity to look over old family photos and souvenirs, marvelling at days gone by. I did notice though that all the photos consist of people smiling sweetly, or posed shots of the family sent back to Australia from Hong Kong for my grandparents.

The advent of the digital camera has obviously had a huge impact on news media and citizen journalism, but the vast majority of pictures being taken now are goofy shots with friends that are then posted to MySpace/Facebook/Flickr/etc. This got me thinking about the way we document our lives now; with the ability to record so much more, maybe the picture is no longer worth a thousand words.

A great shot can still transport us back to a particular time and place, but a dozen just like it tend to dull the sensation for me. The memories are almost too accessible, and while there is something to be gained from that, are we losing something at the same time? Just a thought...

Australia's new government moves to censor the internet

This has been heavily discussed over the blogosphere over the last few days, but it is worth making sure it receives a necessary amount if the right attention.

In an alarming and disappointing move for a party that swept to power on the popular assessment that the incumbent government had "lost touch", the Rudd Government has announced its intention to censor internet content available to Australians.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a former diplomat to China and speaks fluent Mandarin which I personally think is a great thing for a modern Australian Prime Minister. But a move like this takes us politically closer to China in the worst possible way. While it will apparently be possible to opt-out of this feature, there is no mention of any additional scrutiny such moves will garner.

Lee Hopkins has more, as do TechCrunch.

Australia vs. India Test, live on Twitter!

Twitter.com/baggygreen

Apparently social media is reaching deeper than I thought...

Figuring out what is wrong (as opposed to what is right)

I was quoted over at Chris Wilson's Fresh Peel in response to a question he asked: what companies really listened in 2007? Facebook cropped up a few times, and while it can be argued they were forced to listen, the outcry against Beacon paled in comparison to the dissent that rose up against the news feed when it was first introduced. Back then Facebook hadn't become the media darling it is now, and cries of injustice on a still-emerging social networking site were treated with the same gravitas that gets associated with stories about property being stolen in virtual worlds. Were it still operating in that same void, personally I think it would have gotten far less attention and been able to go about it's business. Whether or not that is a good thing is up for (continued) discussion, personally if advertising can be distilled down only to things I am actually interested in, then maybe it simply becomes information, and that is fine by me.

There's more to this though. Online strategies are increasingly being formed not around what is right, but what is least wrong. The idea itself is nothing new and gets discussed exhaustively in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan (shameless plug: I'm part way through and thoroughly enjoying it). It's something I encounter in my day job too; the fact of the matter is if you're working in this space you are almost always trying new things. Can I say for certain that "Idea X" is right? No, but I can tell you it is less wrong than "Idea Y".

My thoughts here are well and truly still forming, but the beauty of this medium is you're allowed to share them before they become concrete, in the hope they become something better. At the risk of going out on a limb, I'm going to say for certain that that is right.