Thanksgetting

In the groaning aftermath of Thanksgiving, the nation is already casting its insatiable eyes to the biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday, the official kick-off of the year-end Hail Mary consumerama sometimes quaintly referred to as Christmas.

Shopping isn’t just the central transaction in an economy that’s rapidly evolved from manufacturing to consuming. It’s at the core of our identity. Get the best thing, get the best deal, but by all means get something. Throw out the old stuff and repeat.

It’s trite to be overly judgmental about this – we’re all complicit in this frantic paddling in the shallow end. We might be grateful instead that this relentless materialism has provided amazing prosperity no only to ourselves but to people around the world who labor to make and ship the objects of our restless desires. Our retail, marketing, and advertising industries depend on people buying more sweaters and iterations of gadgets than they know what to do with.

Like all marketing gimmicks, Black Friday is no longer enough. It isn’t even true anymore, in terms of being the day when retailers’ bottom lines finally go into the “black” for the year – we buy like crazy all year long. So now we also have Virtual Monday, for deal-seekers who don’t want to leave the warmth of their computers. And under consideration: an American launch of Boxing Day, the traditional British holiday that gave the servants December 26 off since they had to man their employers’ parties the day before. It could be a great way to goose those all-important after-Christmas sales, proponents argue. http://bit.ly/eFjbwE

Games People Play

We’re just trying to get our heads around Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, squinting through the mourning veil we’ve donned for our beloved books (the real ones, not the “e-” variety), which Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab tells us will be gone in five years.

Now we’re being told “decade of social” is over. What? Already?

That’s the argument of Seth Priebasch, who writes in the Harvard Business Review (September 9, 2010) that the “decade of games” is upon us. While the last decade was all about connections and integrating a social fabric to every facet of our digital and analog existence, this next decade is all about influence. Oh, for heaven’s sakes!

When he speaks of games, Priebasch is referring to the underlying behavioral dynamics, not specific game software such as World of Warcraft and Farmville or hardware like Nintendo Wii and Xbox. These dynamics, he predicts, will alter such non-computer environments as customer service, workplace, entertainment, and shopping.

We should probably listen to him. He is 21 after all. And he’s the “Chief Ninja” (something oldsters quaintly refer to as “CEO”) of SCVNGR, a mobile gaming company funded by Google. “I tend to think of life as a giant game,” he writes, “a somewhat poorly designed for sure, but one big game nevertheless. I enjoy watching how game dynamics subtly, often invisibly, influence almost everything that everyone does.”

So that’s the game then: gaining influence, manipulating choices. The social network infrastructure was built so we could track and channel the traffic. Nice.

Games are certainly the rage. President Obama recently announced two video game design competitions, one to encourage students to get more interested in technology (the winners will get $50,000 worth of computer stuff for their schools), the other for pros to conjure up a game to spark young interest in science, technology, engineering and math.

Priebasch says there are seven game dynamics that can be employed to “get anyone to do anything.” His favorites:

The Appointment Dynamic — a “player” must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action. Happy hours would be an example, as would the online game Farmville. He foresees health care companies using this dynamic to improve fidelity to medicinal regimens or the government to reduce traffic overload with financial incentives.

The Progression Dynamic – the player’s progress (score) is displayed and improves with task completion. Example: Activision’s World of Warcraft, with 11 million monthly players worldwide or a café that offers a free drink once you’ve purchased nine.

Communal Discovery — An entire community works together to solve a problem. can be used to solve immensely difficult problems in record time.

Malcolm Gladwell said later in an interactive discussion at NewYorker.com: “Oy. Save me. This is what drives me crazy about the digerati. They refuse to accept the fact that there is a class of social problems for which there is no technological solution. … Technology does not and cannot change the underlying dynamics of ‘human’ problems: it doesn’t make it easier to love or motivate or dream or convince.”

To which I’d like to add: people playing games to manipulate other people. What’s new about that? All through recorded history, you can read about that. In a book.

*****
ADDENDUM: Here’s a link to how businesses are using games to boost sales, training, and productivity: http://buswk.co/lQlVTg

Finally a Use for the Internet: Complaining With Effect

Social media is attracting more and more older people. Social media is great for complaining. … Coincidence?

I kid. But really, a phenomenon is afoot. A recent survey conducted for the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that social media use among those 50 and older zoomed from 22 percent in 2009 to 42 percent by 2010.

That study found that Internet users aged 50-64 almost doubled their use of social media to 47 percent (with one in five saying they check social networks daily, also up 100 percent). Social network use among those 65+ doubled to 26 percent (with those checking in daily more than tripling to 13 percent). Meanwhile those 18-29 (a.k.a. the youngsters) are slowing down (if only because they’re already such heavy users). Social networking among that group went from 76 percent in April 2009 to 86 percent in May 2010.

A separate Pew study (they’re very inquisitive people) found that Americans ages 70-75 who were online increased from 26 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2009.

[Update: The average age of a Facebook user is 38 years old, according to statistics compiled by Flowtown and publicized by Pamorama, http://bit.ly/9FDtvQ. For a company that started exclusively with college students, more than 60 percent of its users are now older than 38. The average Twitter user is 39, with 64 percent being 35 or older.]

Back in the day, with dates designated as b.c. (before computers), people would complain by writing a letter. Then as civilization progressed, they would make a phone call – and talk to a real person. In their own country. Eventually, however, the computer age made it possible to be ignored in a whole new way: email.

Companies might be wistful for those days. Facebook and Twitter in particular have empowered consumers and voters to view their opinions very quickly and often with great effect. Stories abound of people impotently complaining in (increasingly) old fashioned ways – and then getting a corporate response within minutes after using Twitter or YouTube instead. United Airlines mangled Dave Carroll’s guitar and then relegated him in customer service purgatory. So he created a music video that attracted nine million viewers on the Internet. And then he quickly got relief from UA.

[Update: The wax of social networks and wane of email will likely continue, and thus have consequences for marketing and customer service. The same statistics compiled by Flowdown cited above indicate that those age 18-29 use social media as much as email to communicate – and those under 18 prefer social networks over email.]

Customer service, long seen as a “cost center” drag on earnings, is rapidly getting more attention in the social media age. It’s been a long time coming, as complainers’ true numbers and depth of sentiment are perpetually under-represented; only a small percentage of dissatisfied customers actually make the effort to complain formally. Not surprisingly, customer service hasn’t been seen as an easy target of cutbacks in times of austerity (or greed). Furthermore, businesses, ever promiscuous, have favored wooing new customers (sales and marketing) over romancing existing ones (customer service). That imbalance will likely change.

“Until now, most customer service has been in a black hole of obscurity,” Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Online Strategic Services recently told Time magazine. “Now you just spend a few minutes searching tweets to see who’s mad and then how they were dealt with.” He wrote a book whose title pretty much sums up the new reality: Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.

Conclusion: because all age groups are increasingly using social media to communicate, these networks are also the future of both marketing and customer service.

News Organ Gets a New Master

What do you get a 91-year-old billionaire who has everything but youth? How about a faded news organ to amplify his voice?

The nonagenarian is Sidney Harman, founder of Harman International and its stable of high-end audio brands. The periodical is Newsweek, owned for half a century by The Washington Post, which is increasingly positioning itself as an education company through its Kaplan division. [See http://yhoo.it/harmannewsweek]

What Harman is buying for a reported $1 is a media property that has posted an operating loss of more than $41 million in the last two years and must continue printing at a loss for a while if only because of the $40 million in subscription money it’s taken against the delivery of future magazine issues.

Reporting- and editing-intensive news weeklies are also expensive to produce, carrying expectations of instant analysis that more thoughtful monthlies don’t have to meet. Having “week” in your name probably doesn’t help either in a 24/7 mobile digital info ecoystem. Sounds more like “weak.”

If anyone doubts that no one buys the past, only the future and its alluring promises, consider the recent sale of Associated Content for a reported $90-100 million to Yahoo. Its asset base is basically an army of scribes who are willing to work for little to nothing, grinding out forgettable, keyword-laden advertiser bait. Hey, who needs the expense of thoughtful analysis and a stable of Pulitzer Prize winners?

In a rapidly changing age where web-based news aggregators and blog factories make moguls of the likes of Arianna Huffington, print news magazines seem like faded sirens from yesteryear. But Harman is not alone in seeing life in the old gals yet. After all, money-hemorrhaging Newsweek drew several bidders and multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg parted with $5 million in pocket change to pick up BusinessWeek recently. (But the financial information empire had a clear strategic purpose for a business magazine and quickly redesigned the publication for that role.)

If long-time operators like the Post and McGraw-Hill are desperate to get out (and they were), why are others trying to get in? Harman and his wife, a longtime congresswoman from California, no doubt enjoy intellectual tussle and the satisfaction of influencing public policy. Perhaps they’ve jealously watched Bloomberg mount multiple peaks of business, media and politics, or Mort Zuckerman for that matter. And consider one of the toughest, shrewdest investors in the world, Carlos Slim of Mexico. He has accumulated a stake in the New York Times second only to the controlling family’s (in the form of lucrative bonds so he probably can’t lose).

What’s going on here? Business contrarianism? Far-sighted vision not available to us mortals who can’t see around corners? Vanity?

Whatever, Harman’s not worried about his new property’s waning fortunes. He said today he will give the magazine “years” to turn itself around. His determination to stay in the game is admirable, but honestly … years? We all know that only Sumner Redstone is immortal.

Necessarily Blind, Not Deaf

If history and our own lives teach us anything it’s that our species is remarkably inept at doing the things we KNOW we should do that involve short-term pain for long-term gain: dieting, quitting smoking, reducing carbon emissions, saving money. Individuals, families … entire countries can drown in debt, for instance, and go down the tubes because of a refusal to make this short term/long term tradeoff.

And then, shades of Don Rumsfeld, there are all the unknown pitfalls lying in wait because we don’t see what’s coming. Consider the plight of companies tripped up by their own success. Dominant players of the past such Digital Equipment Corp., General Motors, Sony, and virtually every newspaper company sat on their leads and didn’t innovate because they felt confident their successful business models that would carry forward into the future.

Lesson: Technology is disruptive, and it’s paradoxically necessary to depart from successful business plan before you’re left behind. Nimble transitions are necessary, like a clothing retailer responding to fashion changes. The saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has become “Break it before your competition does.”

Even if we don’t know exactly what changes are in store, we should know that there WILL be changes – and we should be prepared to adapt (quickly) to survive. For individuals, continual, life-long education is a must. For companies, finding, listening to, and learning from customers through social media are key. We can’t see the future, but we can keep our ear to the ground.

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