Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

OK, I will admit it – I may have a slight man-crush on Clay Shirky. I quote him often, watch any video he’s in, and read everything he writes. The term “thought leader” is overused in our hyperactive blogosphere, but the term truly applies to Shirky. His first book, “Here Comes Everybody – The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” looked past the obvious points everyone else was making about social media and unveiled the long term effects it would have on organizations. Put another way, he was thought-leading.

His encore book is “Cognitive Surplus – Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” and it is vintage Shirky. Every page is dense with original ideas about how social media is going to affect society. The very title of the book suggests that there is a surplus of brain power up for grabs. But since cognitive capacity is a zero sum game, the surplus has to come from somewhere. This begs the question, “Where do people find the time?”

The Essence

Shirky tells a story about a conversation he had with a television producer who was trying to determine whether or not to have him on her show. He talked about the controversy of Pluto’s “delisting” as a planet and the sudden spike in activity on its Wikipedia page. Shirky waited for her to follow up with questions about the social implications of this phenomenon, but “Instead, she sighed and said, ‘Where do people find the time?” Hearing this, I snapped, and said, ‘No one who works in television gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from.’”

The 1970's television show "Gilligan's Island" had many pondering the eternal question, "Ginger or Mary Ann?"

He estimates that there are roughly a trillion hours spent watching television worldwide each year. The advent of the industrial age and, with it, the 40 hours work week meant that the post World War II industrialized societies had an abundance of free time and television swooped in and soaked up most of it. We laughed at ourselves for spending so much time contemplating the such mysteries of the universe as, “Ginger or Mary Ann?“.

Social media represents competition for our free time. The big difference between it and television is that our every use of social media is, by definition, a creative act. Whether it’s uploading vacation photos to Flickr or sharing pearls of wisdom on Twitter, we have made something that didn’t previously exist. We can debate the value and merit of this content until the cows come home, but what is not debatable is that watching television creates nothing.

The question now becomes, what will come from the creative activities of “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” as he calls them?

Means, Motive and Opportunity

In three of the book’s chapters, presents the implications of the Cognitive Surplus in the framework of a legal argument; means, motive and opportunity. “The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes.” They payoff in the book comes from the motive and opportunity topics, where the rubber truly meets the road.

The Skinny

Why it rocks:

The book is fruitcake-dense with ideas, evidence, and challenges. It looks well beyond the horizon of such comparatively insignificant questions as “Google versus Facebook”, or “How much is a follower worth?” Cognitive Surplus is a book about how human beings will harness each others’ brains in order to work together at changing the world.

Why it doesn’t:

It’s not the easiest read in the world. Not because of his writing style, but simply because you spend so much time contemplating the implications of the machine gun pace of ideas he unleashes.

The Verdict

This is an important book. It may not necessarily be important to you, but the concepts are far reaching and somewhat mind boggling. If you’re wondering what role LOL Cats may play in the future of mankind, Shirky goes a long way toward putting all things social media into context.

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The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for just 2% of its mass – a whopping 900% premium.  It generates 25 watts of power each day and demands 15% of the heart’s output.  The average reader can comprehend 120 words per minute,  taking nearly fourteen hours to read a typical novel (100k words) at a cost of almost 1,000 calories (or 4.2 kJ), 164 gallons of blood (or 622 liters) and nearly $300 in lost wages (theoretically for average U.S. wage earner at $21/hour).

In terms of energy, blood flow, and time, reading is very slow, expensive, and inefficient.

I think this raises some interesting questions, such as:

• As an author,
  what is the return on brain-investment for reading my article, novel, or blog post?
• As a publisher,
  how do I convince the reader to invest in my product(s)?
• As a device manufacturer,
  how can I make the reading experience most brain-efficient and enjoyable?

Reading for Effect Versus Purpose

It seems to me that there are two reasons for reading; effect or purpose.  Reading for effect is essentially fulfilling some internal, emotional need like escapism, voyeurism, arousal, etc…  Put simply, it’s entertainment and entertainment plays by different rules than other products.  We are, generally speaking, much more willing to give up two hours of our lives to have a good cry or watch a bunch of explosions than to read chapter 12 of our favorite physics textbook.  Reading for enjoyment is an activity that not everyone enjoys, but those who do are willing to invest for the pleasure and emotional fulfillment it brings; they are not necessarily calculating an ROI.

Reading for purpose means doing so specifically for achieving some goal or outcome, or put another way, because one needs to and not necessarily because one wants to.  Reading for educational purposes, staying informed, or as part of one’s job are examples of reading for purpose.  This category is far more sensitive to the high cost of reading than the former.  For example, most people who read newspapers will skim the articles looking for interesting stories, and then skim the story to see if it is worth the investment.  One does not skim War and Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, or The Lord of the Rings.

Pacific Coast Highway (Creative Commons license via Frank Kehren's Flckr stream)

I would liken these to the difference between a pleasure ride down the Pacific Coast Highway and commuting to work.  You are performing the same task (driving), using the same tool (car), perhaps for the same amount of time, and maybe even with the same person(s).  Yet everything about the drive is different.  In the case of the former, it’s about enjoying the journey, whereas in the latter it is all about reaching your destination as quickly, efficiently, and painlessly as possible.

Implications

There are obvious implications to looking at reading in these two contexts.  Obviously, it behooves the content producers and consumers to understand whether their writing is intended to be a journey or a destination.  Once this is understood, certain strategies and tactics become clear.

For Authors

When writers intend to take their readers on a journey, the style and tempo must be a cognitive banquet.  The experience itself is the return on the reader’s investment.  Efficiency gives way to pace and style takes precedence over not burying the lead.  When writing for purpose, however, the author must understand that from the first word of the title onward, the reader is calculating the return on her investment and may cancel at any time it seems like the deal isn’t profitable enough.  As such, it is important to introduce the value proposition early on (i.e. don’t bury the lead) and get to the point quickly.  Of course, sprinkling in some color so that the reader enjoys the journey won’t hurt a bit either.

For Publishers

Nothing says "romance" like a black and white printout taped to a light pole (Creative Commons license via sixes & sevens Flickr stream)

Readers interested in going on a journey will evaluate content much like shopping for a vacation.  Cost is always a factor, but so is scenery, adventure, luxury, relaxation, romance, etc…  Therefore, packaging and marketing are going to mean a lot.  It must appeal to the prospective reader on an emotional level and promise to fulfill not only their needs, but desires as well.  Purpose readers, on the other hand, are hunters scrutinizing the landscape for prey.  They will be intent on getting to their destination as quickly and efficiently as possible; a pleasant journey is a fringe benefit and not a primary concern.

Newspapers are perched precariously between both of these paradigms, and so they have a tough job balancing them.  There are news reports, stock quotes, classified advertisements, and other assorted facts and items people want to quickly scan and read if they perceive some return on investment.  Other sections, like essays, travel, or editorials are much more about journey and need to be packaged and delivered differently.

Business to business publications are by and large firmly entrenched in the purpose-reading camp.  Their mission is to deliver industry-relevant information in a non-biased and convenient format.  They face issues of timeliness, relevancy, and ubiquity.  Timeliness is an issue in the age of real time search, self-publication, and social networking.  Answers are frequently a few mouse clicks and moments away, so a weekly or monthly publication is at a disadvantage.  Relevancy is an issue for similar reasons.  Readers are able to find very specific information on obscure subjects relatively easily, while publications are always trying to balance completeness against overload.  Ubiquity is a reference to the fact that publishers can’t always be in the right place at the right time.  Publish your information on your web site, and the reader may not have it available during that lunch meeting with a vendor.  Publish your information in print, and the reader no doubt will have thrown it out before realizing they needed it.  The challenge in B2B publishing is not as much marketing or style as it is timeliness, relevancy, and ubiquity.  They need to have the information the reader wants at the time he wants it, where he wants it.  But just as importantly, it must be in at an acceptable brain-cost.

For Device Manufacturers

I recently wrote that the iPad is heralding the age of content.  There has been much discussion about the impact it will have on print media and other existing content consumption devices.  If you accept the argument that reading for effect is much less sensitive to cost factors and substitute forms, then the likely conclusion is that the iPad (and subsequent tablet products) will have a different effect on different types of content.  If the key to reading for effect is the experience, then I submit that appliances like the iPad and other color readers deliver a superior experience to books.  Content of this type is also inoculated against infection from other forms of media like video.  When reading for purpose, however, it remains to be seen whether the efficiency and usability can be improved when compared to a computer.  But with the (assumed) increased availability of high quality video, which is a more efficient means for acquiring information, reading for purpose is going to be marginalized to some degree.  The key for the device manufacturers is to understand the features that will address each of these types of reading.

The Bottom Line

As Clay Shirky brilliantly observed, we don’t live in a world of information overload but a world with filter failure.  Part of the price of that failure is shorter attention spans and greater sensitivity to the expense of reading.  As more solutions evolve and improve our ability to filter, it would be easy to conclude that it will be more difficult for authors and publishers to get their content “through the walls” and to their audience.  But I rather believe that the filters won’t simply get stronger, they will get better.  This means that it will actually be easier for readers to find the content they are truly interested in and be more willing to pay the brain-price.  However, I think this also spells doom for purveyors of broad swaths of content like newspapers and magazines.  Once these filters get sophisticated enough, readers will be able to find the very best of the content they want with laser precision.  Rather than subscribing to a sports magazine like Sports Illustrated, readers can subscribe to “stories about the New England Patriots, Boston Red Sox, any player named Horatio, or cricket matches played in the southern hemisphere on a Monday.”  Publishers of “reading for purpose” content are going to have to find a way to deal with this paradigm.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is about crowd power; for better or worse.

#5: Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

Categorizing this article as “crowd power” is a little bit of a stretch, but it had to be included in the High Five nonetheless.  In the wake of the iPad product announcement, this fascinating article describes in great detail how the mob-like corporate culture of Microsoft didn’t simple stifle innovation; it barbarically tore it limb from limb and left the pieces scattered across lobbies and conference rooms as a warning to the next group of would-be world changers.

Link: New York Times (Op-Ed)

#4: NFL.com aggregates Super Bowl tweets and pics

The National Football League has jumped into the social media gauntlet with both feet for Superbowl XLIV.  They’ve announced an “official” (doesn’t everything need to be the official “x” of event “y”?) Twitter hash tag (#SB44) and Flickr photo stream, both of which will be aggregated to a dedicated page on their site.

Link: Pro Football Talk on NBC Sports

#3: We’re turning comments off for a bit

This unfortunate announcement was made on the Engadget web site early this week because the environment “has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.”  The situation illustrates one of the darker sides of social media and the tough decisions that must sometimes be made.  It’s a manageable task to moderate these forums unless and until they become a victim of their own success and simply grow too large.  I see this as the new job role for public relations professionals in the future – once they finally come to the realization that their current role of shaping messages is gone forever.

Link: Engadget

#2: Facebook COO: 175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day

While the total number of registered Facebook users (over 350 million) gets lots of press, this number is eye-popping for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the sheer size is obviously impressive.  That’s a lot of eyeballs.  Second, the adoption rate of 50% is astounding.  We heard just a few weeks ago that 70% of Twitter users are active more than once a week and 30% never post a single update.  This number is evidence that Facebook is not just growing at a break neck pace, it is retaining users and providing compelling reasons for them to log in every day.

Link: TechCrunch

#1: 20+ mind-blowing social media statistics revisited

Well, I’d certainly say “impressive” but can’t say that my mind was blown.  Notwithstanding the sensationalized and overstated title, this is a valuable page to bookmark for your next blog post or sales pitch for social media.

Link: Econsultancy

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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PowerPoint doesn't kill people, bad presentations kill people.

I used to think I was pretty good at creating presentations. I took a business communications class in graduate school and learned the same old rules; limit your fonts, three to seven bullet points, don’t read your slides, blah blah blah. I withstood others’ horrible presentations, invisibly smirking and silently mocking the 250 word novels slides with their horrifying color schemes and monotone, stammering presenter.  I congratulated myself on not being “that guy.”  But the truth is that I was just as guilty of Really Bad PowerPoint as anyone else.

Then I read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and everything changed.  My goal in this blog post is nothing short of paying forward that same change, and so I’m using myself as a case study to show what my presentations used to look like, what they look like now, and what I aspire them to be in the future.

But before we go down that road, in case you’re dubious about whether or not really bad PowerPoint is a problem, here is a presentation that Guy Kawasaki put together that was used as the forward to Presentation Zen.

The Presenter As Storytellter

The number one lesson I’ve learned is that “slides do not a presentation make.”  Rather, they are simply a prop for the story you’re telling.  The following slide show contains a series of before and after shots from the same presentation, which I completely overhauled after reading Presentation Zen.  They illustrate the first major change; move the narrative off of the slides and into the oratory.

[View with PicLens]

Once the presentation is transformed from a distraction to a storytelling prop, the burden of communication falls on the story itself.  Based on the recommendation in Presentation Zen, I also read “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die.”  This indispensable book presents six principles that make stories “sticky.”  It’s invaluable to crafting messages of all sorts, not just creating presentations.  Whether writing an email, composing a blog post, or crafting a memo outlining your thoughts on your organization’s next mission statement this book will help you do it more effectively and memorably.  These six principles can be represented by the acronym “SUCCESs”:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

The Presenter As Designer

Duh.  That’s the one word that best describes how I felt while reading Presentation Zen.  Reynolds eloquently and convincingly makes the case that design is important, poorly understood, and badly implemented (by and large).  Those were the “duh” moments, as I realized that those are all true and that I had never realized it or paid much attention previously.  But next came salvation, as basic design principles and techniques are presented that make it possible to learn how to improve design.  Imagine that – you can actually learn how to design!  Looking back, I can’t believe that design wasn’t part of the core curriculum for my engineering degree or any of the computer science tracks I’ve seen.  And now that we live in the age of Web 2.0 where we are all content producers, it seems to me that it should be required in all college programs.  But I digress.

Reynolds begins by stressing simplicity, balance, noise suppression, and space.  These are all related and as I look back on my old presentations it seems as though I was deliberately violating as many of these guidelines as possible on every slide.  Take the slide shown below, for example.  This is not simple at all; there are too many ideas at once and even the screen shot, while appropriate was still complex and distracting.  The layout is completely unbalanced and top-heavy.  The slide template is noisy with lines and the “ISA” logo implanted in the corner of every slide.  Finally, there is a small amount of empty space on the slide, but it is concentrated in one corner and looks more like something is missing.  They eye darts around this slide searching for meaning with no help provided from the design.

My personal design renaissance has begun with what Reynolds calls “The Big Four:” contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.  I’ll now provide examples from my own presentations on how I’ve implemented these principles.

This slide uses contrast in two different ways.  The first is the color contrast between the dark gray background and the pure white text. The words jump off the page in way that bullets never can.  The second use of contrast is the emphasis of the words “interesting” and “boring” by changing the font size. For some reason we seem to be afraid to make things BIG enough or bold enough.

One of the central themes of this particular presentation was the abundance of free tools available on the Internet in our Web 2.0 world. Therefore, I made use of design repetition by placing the “Free” price tag graphic element on eight consecutive slides in the exact same spot. I also made sure to emphasize this in my delivery by asking the audience to guess how much each solution cost. Of course, the answer was the same and the audio and visual repetition made sure that this point would be driven home. Plus, the audience had fun with it.

Alignment stresses the importance of making objects appear as if they were placed in a particular place deliberately, rather than simply thrown anywhere there was space available. This slide aligns the letters of an acronym quite deliberately to show their relationship. While this is a good example of alignment, I’m not sure it’s a great example of contrast, balance, or noise. I’m sure there is a better way to present this idea, so I will keep tinkering.

This title slide demonstrates the use of proximity.  The graphic and title are strongly related and so they are grouped together in close proximity.  My name, company, and position are also grouped together and separated from the title in order to distinguish and de-emphasize them.  You can also see elements of contrast and alignment in play here as well.

Photo credits:
“death-by-presentation” from HikingArtist.com on Flickr (Creative Commons)

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"Battlefield-13" from zhengxu on Flickr Creative Commons

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”  This quote from Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, chief of staff for the Prussian army in the late 1800′s and one of the great strategists, has had a profound effect on modern warfare tactics and forms the basis for a concept called “Commander’s Intent.”  When orders are handed down through the U.S. Army, each has a short, plain speaking description of the intent of the specific order.  These statements get more and more specific as the orders are given down the command chain.  The idea is that each commander, company, and soldier has a clear understanding not only of the plan, but the intent of the plan.  While plans may fail due to any number of reasons, the soldiers are able to adapt, improvise, overcome and complete their mission if they understand the commander’s intent.

And so it is with social media strategy, I think.  If you empower your organization to truly engage in social media and to build trust with your customers, constituents, and colleagues then they will not necessarily be entering into battle, but it will still be the same sort of fluid, unpredictable situation.  It’s as important to communicate the commander’s intent to them as it is to have a detailed strategy.

To that end, I have come up with a memorable and (hopefully) “sticky” acronym for what I think is a useful guide for the social media commander’s intent; BARE.  This stands for “Be Authentic, Relentless, and Everywhere.”

Be Authentic

Don't be the online equivalent of a streotypical used car salesman

OK, in order to make this work I had to settle on one word here but the reality is that “authentic” is a stand-in for several others like affable and approachable.  Generally speaking it means that you need to be yourself, and treat others the way you want to be treated (sound familiar?).  Using Twitter is a nonstop, mechanized press release squawk box is not authentic.  Talking about relevant industry news or celebrating a customer’s success is.  It’s important to be conversational and respectful of online friends and followers by posting information that is relevant to them.  That’s not the same as saying it needs to be important.  Posting pictures of the company’s holiday party isn’t going to make it easier for anyone to do their job, but it tells a story and makes a human connection with people.  Most people actively engaged in social media have an extremely sensitive B.S. detector and will flame you without conscience for being disingenuous or disrespectful online.

Be Relentless

It takes time to build a network.  However, it’s something that must be done steadily and with purpose.  Eventually, if your content is worth following the network will continue to grow over time.  Canyons are formed in similar ways.  Most of the formation is done slowly and constantly over long periods of time by small bodies of moving water and wind.  But there are also storms and floods that cause torrents of water to flow through them a cut away large swaths of land in one shot.  This is the equivalent of “going viral” on the web when you post content that gets lots of traction and attracts large numbers of followers in a short period of time.  Slow and steady wins the race, as they say, so stay the course and keep working toward that flood!

Be Everywhere

This is not to be taken literally – you only have so many resources to dedicate so you need to be smart about it.  Re-purposing content is the key to this strategy.  By developing systems that can deliver a single bundle of content to multiple social media channels, you can maximize your productivity and minimize your time investment.  One technology that allows you to do this is Posterous.  By simply sending a single email to your Posterous account, it will decide which channels should also receive the content and reproduce it in multiple places.  For example, sending an email with a group of photos attached causes Posterous to post the pictures to a previously authorized Flickr account.  It will also convert them to a slide show for display on your Posterous page and send updates with links to your Twitter account and Facebook fan page.  You need to squeeze every drop of value from all of the content that you generate by posting it everywhere you can, with as little effort as possible.  This will generate the most traffic back to your content and also have the best chance of finding people where they live.  Not everyone uses Twitter just like not everyone uses Facebook.  After all, why did Willy Sutton rob banks?  Because that’s where the money is.

Be Authentic, Relentless, and Everywhere!

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