Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

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

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s High Five deals with two ends of the social media marketing spectrum; fun and failure.

I wrote about the historic influence of games last October when I predicted that the future of software is Facebook.  There have been some major business moves involving big money this week, illustrating how pervasive entertainment is in the world of Internet marketing.  But games can get a little rough and like mom used to say, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt!”

#5: Disney About To Acquire Playdom

Disney is obviously the 800 pound gorilla of fun and games.  They tend to be a bit conservative as a company, so it’s not a shocker that they are a little late to the social space.  But any company with the brand power and balance sheet of Disney can make big moves quickly.  Their first major move was the acquisition of the children’s game site Club Penguin.  Establishing a stronger beach head in social gaming gives them more channels to keep their brands in kids’ faces.

Link: TechCrunch

#4: The Web Means the End of Forgetting

It is said that an elephant never forgets, but neither does the Internet.  Cautionary tales of moments in which relatively minor lapses in judgement are posted online and lead to long term personal and/or professional consequences continue to pile up.  What happens at the night club not longer necessarily stays at the night club thanks to ubiquitous smart phones and social media.  This New York Times article focuses on personal reputation, but obviously brands are no less vulnerable to an ill advised Tweet or boneheaded Facebook photo.

Link: The New York Times

#3: Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?

For all its hype and media coverage, Twitter has yet to turn a profit.  The creators of FarmVille and Mafia Wars, however, are on track to eclipse $500 million this year.  Yeah, that just happened.

Link: The New York Times

#2: Expert Notes Few Marketers Do Social Media Well

It’s no longer disputed that social media is (at the very least) the most important marketing game changer since television.  And so it’s natural for marketing companies to update their service offerings to say they can implement social media marketing.  The vast majority of them are ill-prepared and simply applying old techniques to a new technology.  Anyone can slap together a Facebook page and create a Twitter account, but how are they measuring success?  Is it integrated to an inbound marketing strategy?

Link: MediaPost

#1: Older Actors Upstage Youth at Comic-Con

You can always tell when an element of pop culture jumps the shark: the old fogies start showing up.  As Hollywood increasingly goes back to the future by recycling classic comic book stories for “new” films, purists inevitably balk and rebel.  Kind of like the changing demographics on Facebook, no?

Link: The New York Times

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I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

Today I’m commenting on the current plague of companies looking to enslave college students and recent graduates in order to help them establish a presence in social media.

I subscribe to multiple Craigslist RSS feeds and every single day there is at least one advertisement from a company looking to bring in unpaid interns for various jobs.  Many of them are mundane, computer-oriented tasks but many of them look just like this one:

Do you tweet, blog and use social media like Facebook all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the event industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its’ social media campaign.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of social media; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging Platforms. Have exceptional writing skills. Proficient in MAC and Basic HTML. A passion for weddings is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Aside from the spelling errors and poor grammar, what’s so bad about this?

Crime Doesn’t Pay

That’s right, if your internship doesn’t meet six federal legal criteria you are violating federal labor laws.  Many employers mistakenly think that they can hire unpaid interns because they are providing enough value through the experience the interns gain.  However, this is the wrong perspective. They need to consider whether or not the person materially provides value to the company.  If so, they must be paid.  If not, why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Hobbyist Vs. Professional

Let’s try rewriting the advertisement listed above using a different profession and see how it may turn out…

Norm Abram is the seemingly superhuman master craftsman who has hosted the PBS television show, "The New Yankee Workshop" for some 20 years.

Do you caulk, paint and watch television programs like the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the construction industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its residential construction business.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of construction; hammers, nails, saws. Have exceptional painting skills. Proficient driving Fords and Chevys. A passion for subdivisions is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Sounds absurd, no?  Just because a person knows how to use a hammer or circular saw doesn’t mean they know how to build a load-bearing wall, right?  And watching Norm Abram every weekend for two years doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a ten foot Clancy sailboat from scratch.  Knowing how to use tools does not mean that a person understands how to design, finance, construct, and sell a home.

Well, just because a student posts pictures of friends’ compromising antics on Facebook and has a few thousand followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they understand how to effectively architect, implement, and measure a social media marketing campaign.  That’s even assuming that the business already understands how the social media marketing strategy will fit into its overall marketing strategy, but they frequently do not.

What’s the Harm?

Here is a short list of some of the missteps that can lead to more harm than good:

• It is possible to attract the wrong audience. The first rule of search optimization is, “do no harm.”
• Blogging carries legal responsibilities including copyright infringement and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
• Facebook’s Terms of Use are complicated and even contradictory. Violating them can get you banned.
• Anything worth doing is worth measuring. Fan and follower counts do not tell the story.
• Creating compelling, engaging content is challenging and dynamic.
• Hope is not a strategy.

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This presentation was given at the ACE 2010 Interactive Social Media Workshop in Chicago on 20-June, 2010.  It provides some tips for Twitter beginners.  You can also download the Getting Started on Twitter speaker’s notes.

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One of my favorite, most quotable movies of all time is The Princess Bride.  While a small group of kidnappers is pursued by a masked man, the ring leader (Wallace Shawn) repeatedly exclaims, “Inconceivable.”  Eventually, Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) grows weary of hearing this every time their plans are thrown of kilter, saying, “You keep on using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Which brings me to the point of this post.  I saw another marketing article this week (which shall remain anonymous) from a highly respected thought leader in the industry, which looked at a very small set of statistics and made ridiculous claims and conclusions based on dubious data.  I see this far too often, especially in the blogoshphere and Twitterverse, where self-made marketing mavens abound who may be very successful and knowledgeable in many areas but also have a tendency to play “weekend warrior” with statistics in order to prove a preconceived point.

Common Mistakes

My engineering and quality control background give me just enough knowledge to be dangerous.  I would never claim to be a statistical guru, but I do know enough to understand when statistics are being abused (sometimes).  I’m going to try to keep this list short and as non-mathematical as possible in the hopes that it can help people be a little more suspicious of titles they read and conclusions they adopt.

Mistake #1: Assuming Normal Distribution

The vast majority of statistics that non-mathematicians use and understand are based on normal distributions.  This is what people commonly understand as the “bell curve,” in which the majority of occurrences in a population are centered around a mean, and tail off more or less evenly on either side.  Whenever you use a term like “average,” “mean,” or “standard deviation,” they must describe data in a random, normal distribution in order to be accurate.  There are mathematical ways to deal with non-normal distributions, but they are rarely applied by the “weekend warriors.”  There are two common fatal flaws that happen:

1. The data itself is not random.  In fact, data is generally much less random than we think; especially if we’re talking about marketing data because human behavior is rarely truly random.  But there are often situations in the physical world (like boundary conditions) that result in non-random distributions also.
2. The sampling is not random or not representative.  There are numerous examples of this, including cherry-picking, small sample groups, placebos, etc…  Garbage in, garbage out.

Mistake #2:  Assuming Causality

This is probably the most common (just a guess on my part) form of statistical abuse, and it comes in several different flavors:

1. Reverse causality: Most basketball players are tall.  Therefore, playing basketball makes you tall.
   Or, if you prefer a marketing example:  Most shared posts on Facebook contain word “x.”  Therefore, word “x” makes your post more sharable.
2. Spurious relationship:  Vodka and water gets you drunk.  Scotch and water gets you drunk.  Gin and water gets you drunk.  Therefore, water causes intoxication, since it is the only common factor (alcohol is the hidden variable).
   Or, if you prefer a marketing example:   Most Twitter re-tweets occur around 4PM.  Therefore, people create better content in the afternoon.
3. Coincidence:  Sales of ice cream increase in direct correlation with increases in drowning deaths.  Therefore, ice cream causes drowning.
   Or, if you prefer a marketing example:  The number of Facebook users has increased sharply during the same period iPod sales have exploded.  Therefore, Facebook is responsible for the success of the iPod.

Mistake #3:  Gambler’s Fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy is rooted in a misunderstanding of randomness.  We feel that a distinctly non-random pattern increases the likelihood of a particular result.  For example, if a roulette wheel lands on black eleven times in a row, we mistakenly believe the changes are greater that the next result will be red.  The chances of a truly random outcome are always the same, regardless of previous outcomes.

Risks

Examples abound from prominent marketing companies and mavens who draw spurious conclusions, based on questionable data sets and containing logical fallacies.  I am concerned that businesses may be making important decisions that result in the mis-allocation of precious resources (time and money) based on declarative titles like, “Data Shows: X Gets Shared More on Y.”  Caveat emptor.

Comic Relief

This post was prompted in part by this brilliant and hilarious TED presentation, “Lies, damed lies and statistics (About TEDTalks) – Sebastian Wernicke.”  As is so often the case, it’s funny because it’s tragically true.

Hat tip to Garr Reynolds for once again provoking thought.

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I was recently interviewed by Juliann Grant of Telesian Technology for one of their excellent “What’s Working” podcasts.  Joining me in the interview was Mike Boudreaux, Product Manager for Emerson.  The topic of conversation was “How to Create Valuable, Relevant Content for Social Media.”

[audio:http://www.domesticatingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/valuable-relevan-content-social-media.mp3|titles=How to Create Valuable, Relevant Content for Social Media]

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