Consulting companies like The Dachis Group promise to help companies with the transformation of becoming a Social Businesses. The to-do list usually looks something like this:

• keep the dialogue with your customers going
• get ready to customize to your clients needs
• be transparent about your ways of production
• consider the impact on your community

While recently walking through the maze of an older New Delhi neighborhood, I couldn’t help but think that that’s pretty much the standard there already.

Obviously, we can’t just scale everything back to a neighborhood store. But the connection that these storeowners had with their community felt very much like the social dimension so many businesses are looking for on Facebook and Twitter.

This fall I was lucky to be able to visit the headquarters of Smart Design in NYC. The global design firm is one of the recognized voices in the resurgence of design. Their iconic work features prominently in Gary Hustwit’s great documentary “Objectified” (Trailer here): a fascinating look at how designed things impact every second of our life.

However, when I sat down with Smart Design’s co-founder Dan Formosa and Paul Katz, their Director of Innovation Engineering, we hardly talked about how they design better working products or how they make sure their design is meaningful. Instead, we mostly focused – and I felt almost sad about it – about the relationship between design, advertising and media. I am writing “almost”, because as it turned out, SmartDesign have a whole lot of clever and fascinating things to say about this as well.

“Back in time, someone would design or invent something. And they would hire a marketer or advertiser to make it known. … At some point in time, probably in the 1950s when television and advertising became extremely popular, the sequence of events flipped.” Advertising campaigns became the primary product, and design updates became a campaign feature – because novelty is easy to communicate.

The media budgets grew – and put marketing in the driver’s seat, while design had to ride in the back. Nowhere was this more obvious than with the annual chrome mutations in US car design. But this kind of “applied design” touched everything, and often an excess in style was used to hide a lack of quality:  “If you saw something that looked like it was designed, you’d be very suspicious” remembers Formosa.

From Applied Design to Meaningful Design

Luckily, things have changed. People have become better at judging design as our culture has become used to advertising. Not only have they learned to ignore the chrome of the 50s and 60s. They have also learned to ignore the tech overkill of the 80s and 90s. Now people are asking how something works for them, and if it adds something meaningful to their life.

Social media have enabled and strengthened this mindset. “Previously if companies made something and it wasn’t great… it would have a life span of a couple of months before word got out. It was much easier to rely on a promise and on a brand. Now… people will know much much sooner.” And Social Media have made it easy to talk about it. The resulting bad buzz can quickly hurt brands and their products’ sales, and good buzz can propel an unknown brand into the limelight just as fast.

Formosa now routinely asks people during speaking engagements whether they have ever used their phone to check for consumer ratings or tests while they were in a store, about to make a purchase. He says almost everyone has. “People feel like they need to check the reviews on the internet and what people are saying. So the purchase is really made by the trust in the social network, not by trust in the brand.” This kind of reassurance was previously only used “for expensive things, but now it’s for little kitchen items.”

Brand Loyalty vs. Product Usability

Successful Brands are obviously learning to react to that. At one point we shortly talked about Apple, of course. More than any other brand Apple understands how usability and meaningfulness are now the core of success for a technology brand. Apple has built its second coming not on technological innovation, but on superior interface design for existing technology. At the same time, their advertising has moved from mindblowing (Macintosh, 1984) to sleep-inducing (iPad, 2010).

(I’d like to insert Apple’s iPhone 4 launch as an example of this new mentality. When the tech writers were throwing hissy fits about the lack of Flash support, Apple barely flinched. But when the first customers reported problems with reception and dropped calls, Apple reacted. It updated the system and offered free phone covers that reduce the problem. Obviously, the real-life complaints mattered more to Steve Jobs than the journalists’ perception of the product. http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band)

Smart Design sees this move from trust in brand values to trust in proven usability as a fundamental trend for many product areas. It creates a two-pronged challenge for brands: 1. People have learned to quickly disinvest from a brand if it disappoints. 2. Only extreme user experiences get documented in the social media.

Better make sure that you design your products to deliver an all-around satisfying experience, says Formosa. A disappointing experience easily warrants a negative comment. However, in a prime example of life being unfair, a product that actually delivers what it promised rarely triggers any reaction.

If you want to build up word of mouth, “what’s really critical for good design is: to exceed expectations” says Formosa. If it just does what you thought it would, “are you actually going to take the time to tell the world on Amazon it did that?” asks Katz. To trigger a positive response, he says, you actually need to get people fired up. “When you look at products that have a lot of good feedback, those are the ones that exceeded expectations.”

Design obviously regains an edge over advertising when the playing field gets redrawn like this. “Companies realize that everyone’s got the same kind of ammo [technologically]. So what do you do to distinguish yourself? Design is really the powerful distinction here,” says Katz. “The investment that companies make in advertising or branding to build up that equity, should be – and is being diverted to design.” adds Formosa, because “the equity that a company has in a brand is much less valuable” these days.

Exceeding expectations: Ford Fusion Hybrid and Flip Video

Digital technology has become incredibly powerful, enabling us to do ever more – and truly magical stuff. But being the limited monkey-descendents that we are, we can only use and appreciate these powers, if the complexity behind them is hidden. “The need to simplify life is great,” says Formosa, and Smart Design has created success by making things ergonomically and emotionally easy to use.

“The Flip camera is definitely a good example” says Katz. While the producing company Pure Digital had introduced low cost video in various forms before, it was the Flip model co-designed by Smart Design that took off. The Flip’s legendary simple user interface – a single red button – brought creating and sharing video into the realm of the everyman and everygranny.

The Flip’s design language not only speaks of simplicity, but also of accessibility. “It’s a very nicely designed camera, but it’s not so precious. So people would throw in their pocket and take it to the beach.”  Doing to video what the iPod did to mp3s, the Flip exceeded user’s expectations, became an overnight sensation, and created an entire new category in the videocamera market.

Giving people something to talk about by making life simpler was also behind another recent Smart Design project: The new dashboard for Ford’s Hybrid limousine, the Ford Fusion Hybrid.

Early in the design process, a big challenge emerged: conventional American driving styles (pedal to the metal? :-) tended to keep Hybrids from reaching their full fuel saving potential, sometimes even making the cars fall short of the advertised miles per gallon (MPG).

Smart Design solved the problem by reducing information and adding a new perspective: “Traditional dashboards inform you about the car’s performance. We decided to also show the driver’s performance”. The new owners of a Ford Fusion will immediately see how their driving style influences the fuel efficiency of their car. To help them adapt to a new way of driving, SmartDesign replaced the rational metrics of traditional gauges with an emotional display of unfolding green leaves.

Success without Advertising

As lofty as this sounds, the results are solid: The first test driver not only matched the announced 41 MPG, he exceeded it by more than 10 gallons – and wrote about it. Other magazines reported similar experiences. And probably so did most non-professional  drivers. Did exceeding expectations make a difference? In a 2010 car market that saw Hybrids struggle for the first time, the Ford Fusion Hybrid is still on a strong growth path, closing the gap to the market leading Toyota Prius.

While driving the Fusion Hybrid created conversational capital to boot, the advertising campaign for the Fusion Hybrid probably didn’t. But maybe it doesn’t need to. If your design exceeds expectations, you just need to tell people.

Have you ever wondered who shows up in your Facebook TOP NEWS stream? And who does not? You probably felt that there’s a pattern behind it. You probably also felt you don’t have a clue what that pattern is.

Facebook gave us a quick look at the math behind this, when they explained their EdgeRank algorithm at F8 developer conference in April. But in the last few weeks, more and more light has been shed on how it actually works. (I added a list of references at end of this article).

Here is the official part, the algorithm shown by Facebook at F8.

The EdgeRank is basically an individualized relevance score for each social object placed in the network: be it status update or video. So what is an Edge? Figuratively spoken, it’s like a finger pointing at your content. EdgeRank sums up the importance of these Edges for each individual facebook user. It does this by looking at three factors:

1. User Affinity (U): How closely has the possible receiver interacted with you in the past. If someone talks to you frequently, then his chance of seeing something you post increases. Other factors might also play a role. Facebook mentioned at F8 that it’s aware that Brand Pages are different. We rarely chat or send messages back and forth with a page.  Be aware that one-way interactions from your side don’t count. You clicking on someone’s profile won’t make your stuff show up in their feed.
2. Weight (W): What kind of interaction is taking place? Some interactions/Edges are more equal than others. A comment seems to get more points than a Like. But we still know very little about this. When asked about the value of a click on an outbound link, etc, Facebook developers at F8 made it clear that some EdgeRank secrets will remain untold.
3. Decay (D): How fresh is the post. This one is easy. The younger, the better. It also seems that posting new content improves the value for older objects.

These values are then multiplied to create an Edge value. Each object’s EdgeRank is the sum of the values of all Edges that point to it.

By limiting the Top News Feed to Objects with a high EdgeRank, Facebook created an automatic News Feed Optimization that vaporizes the social information tsunami and turns it into a manageable flow. While pleasant for me as a reader, and in line with Clay Shirkys prediction that the future is all about information filtering, this has tough social consequences: It can be the equivalent of a party where you start telling a joke, and everybody turns to leave.

With EdgeRank, Facebook is redefining the way we interact with our peers the way Google influenced the way newspapers write. (Ask a journalist :-) At it’s core it re-interprets “important for us” to be the same as “important for others”. It isn’t exactly a stretch to assume that we will adapt to fill out that reward strucuture. Wheter we have a Brand Page to promote, or whether we just want to make sure that our friends see our vacation pictures of Thailand.

A new thing to optimize: Social Relevance

Call it Social Relevance Optimization (SRO), call it dancing to Facebook’s tune: either way, chances are you’re already doing a good bit of it. From the party invitations to the funny videos that you post, you probably make sure not to annoy your friends with duds. And if someone leaves a comment on your wall, your tend to answer it. It’s all pretty much common sense and being polite.

In the old show-all-newsfeed this was actually the best we could do. The one-size-fits-all information filter was radical decay: When we looked at a feed we would see everything in our network, but only the 1-2 hours of it. Twitter still works like that. We probably missed most of the content, but at least everyone had an equally miserable chance to be seen.

Now that Facebook’s “Top News” is doing most of the filtering for us, brands and people who don’t know how to please the system will quietly fall through the cracks that EdgeRank pries open for them.

Difficult for virtual friendships. Desasterous for brand pages. Your brand might be on Facebook. You might have enticed hundreds of people to “Like” it. And yet: In the darkness that is a low EdgeRank, no one will hear you post. Social Media consultants BrandGlue estimate that since the introduction of EdgeRank, less than 1% of Likers/Fans see a new BrandPage post.

Welcome to SRO 101

Here is how you drag your Facebook brand page out of that non-relevance hole. The Daily Beast did an interesting one-month experiment with a new profile, and described what it took to make “Phil Simonetti” show up in other people’s feeds. They list a bunch of cool insights, but it really boils down to three things:

1. Promote your way out of the new page curse fast

A young brand page with few friends has a hard time for two reasons. First, the Interaction history with your Likers contains almost nothing (1 Like), so the Affinity value of your new object/post to anyone is rather low. Secondly, as long as you have less than 10000 Likers, you’re going to get very little interaction. It takes a lot of readers to get a stream of comments. Vitrue offers a free Whitepaer that claims the interaction on Facebook is around 0.5%. (Still better than Twitter where only 1 out of 300 will be retweeted.)

Your way out? Don’t trust the “Social Media are free.” hooopla when it comes to building your network. Use everything you’ve got to get past the treshold. Other websites, print, radio, TV, promotions.

If you can’t throw around money like that, do it the hard way: Bring some time, and be very nice to the first fans. Especially to the ones with few fans! Build deep recurring engement with them, because you might actually show up in their feed. Your changes of coming through on the feed of a popular Facebook member with 500 friends or more are close to nothing. (However, if you can convince someone with a 1000 friends to maniacally click on your content, by all means do it. :-)

2. Create Objects that invite an Edge

An Edge only happens when someone interacts with your content. So this is kinda obvious. As soon as you have enough Likers to be reasnoably certain that someone will answer, invite feedback. Ask questions. Throw in a provocative update to get the discursive juices going. Create comment surveys.

Keep in mind, though, that the relationship between EdgeRank’s AFFINITY and WEIGHT is complex. Facebook attributes different Weights (W) to different Edges. The Daily Beast experiment hints at the following sequence of feedworthyness: Comments beat “Likes”. Likes beat posted links. Links beat the opening/view of fotos and videos. This makes a lot of sense, as mirrors your effort and thus your commitment to a piece of content.

Logically, the likelihood of any of these things to happen is almost inverse. And the amount of responses influences your future AFFINITY ranking. According to a whitepaper by Vitrue, if you are trying to get a response, photos beat videos, videos beat links, and links beat Status Updates.

You’re going to have to decide what is more important to you: If your page has very little interaction yet, you should post photos and videos. If you already receive lots of views, and Likes, upgrade your strategy by asking for comments.

3. Get the right people to act first

Finally we get to the splendidness of Social Media, where an Idea will travel beyond its initial reception or seeding and go its own merry way reaching ever wider circles. An adventurous voyage, fueled by chance and serendipity. Facebook’s EdgeRank is turning it into a chaperoned walk in the park.

Why? Because the love and attention that you receive from a “Liker” will not be featured everywhere along the Social Graph, but only in his/her area. And As we already said, it is rather unlikely for posts to feature in the feeds of a wildly interactive power Facebooker who receives loads of attention from numerous friends.

A much more likely scenario is that your content will travel along a quiet backroad. If the first guy or girl is from a not so releveant subgroup among your Fans/Likers, that subgroup might be the only place your object every travels to, before it’s EdgeRank Decay value (D) buries it for good.

If you’re no Facebook bigshot yet, your task is to create reactions quickly, and in the right interest group. One of the ways to make sure your object gets Edges from the right people is an intial burst of facebook advertising. You can even target the ads to the most relevant subset of your BrandPage’s Likers, which should make it very efficient. This will invite the right people to act, and create early simultaneous actions/Edges. Which enables that object to show up in many more feeds, creating more interaction, which will help keep decay at bay.

Filter failure avoided. What about Filter dominance?

Facebook is neither evil nor innocent. While their ranking obviously helps me filter the information of 500 friends, the algorithm may also clandestinely support behavior that Facebook wants to happen: Facebook needs to promote groups? Tweak a line of code, and interactions/Edges with groups will score better in EdgeRank and move up in the feed.

But the even bigger challenge for Facebook lies in the inherent promise and problem of a post-broadcast communication system. We’ve all become information providers. But what if the information I produce isn’t deemed worthy by an impartial and utterly unemotional algorithm. What if EdgeRank thinks me and you are just noise.

Did 500 million people join Facebook to find out that only 50 million should be heard?

I’m a narcissist. ;-)

How about you?

___________________________

References:

The Article that made me start looking into this: http://www.doseofdigital.com/2010/07/facebook-page-exist/

Navigate to the Techniques sessions, and click on ‘Focus on Feed’. Questions about EDGERANK begins after about 20 minutes:

Video from F8 conference: Go to “Techniques”, click “Focus on Feed”, EdgeRank discussion starts after about 21 minutes. http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/

The Daily Beast Experiment: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-18/the-facebook-news-feed-how-it-works-the-10-biggest-secrets/full/

Vitrue Whitepaper on interaction rates: http://vitrue.com/blog/2010/09/21/anatomy-of-a-facebook-post-vitrue%E2%80%99s-data-behind-effective-social-media-marketing/

Informed speculation on what could be measured in EdgeRank: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-calculate-weight-for-edges-in-the-EdgeRank-formula

Link to HP Labs study on “Influence and Passivity in Social Media” which of course opens the same can of worms for Twitter ;-): http://www.jeffbullas.com/2010/10/08/average-twitter-user-only-retweets-1-in-every-318-links/

And finally: You can now vote for the “Black Art of Optimizing Facebook Wall posts” for  SXSW 2011!: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7760

It’s been a difficult year for tourism. Travelling is one of the first things private households cut in years of financial hardship. In an ironic twist, marketing is what the travel industry cuts in response.

But that isn’t even an option for small hotels who mostly depend on tourists being sent their way. Or, to be more precise, used to be dependent on that. The relationship to various middle men, i.e. travel agents, was the most important driver in small tourism, but that role is moving to the social networks fast.

However, while World of Warcraft might have a horde of community managers on standby, who’s doing the work at the small hotels? That’s what I asked Geinier Guzmán, the General Manager of La Cusinga Lodge in Costa Rica during my recent stay there.

Not every small hotel is hitting the social web with the vigour of La Cusinga. But Guzmán’s strategies probably don’t veer far from the path of economic necessity: Not enough money for a full time social media professional turns it into a trial and error process.

Of course, when engaging with the socialweb, it really helps to have something to say. Guzmán is not only the manager of his own eco lodge, he is also a local politician and an environmental activist. The news he shares with La Cusinga’s network are an engaging mix of hotel factlets and news about environmental issues and sustainable tourism in Costa Rica.

La Cusinga’s strategy of combining advertising and information seems to sit well with the social media audience. More than 2500 fans have joined their Facebook group so far. And bookings for 2010 are looking pretty good, too.

As of November 17th 2009, The Garbage Patch has become a cover story in USA Today. It doesn’t get more mainstream than this. (Nov 17th US issue, Life Section). However, since the actual story of the Garbage Patch is a rather a long-winded one, it won’t give good headline for mainstream media. What do you need instead? A celebrity. Or semi-celebritiy. Or someone with a semi-celebrity name.

Enter David de Rothschild, “whose mission is to forever chance the way the world sees… plastic.” Sadly, it isn’t until the seventh paragraph that USA Today finally shifts attention from de Rothschild’s family, residence, air travel habits, height and wealth to the problem at hand: “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a borderless swath of floating debris that sprawls across much of the Pacific.”

Inspired by Kon-Tikis minimal approach to seatravel, De Rothschild has built his Katamaran Plastiki entirely out of recycled material -- mostly used plastic bottles.  His plan: to sail through the Garbage Patch, collect samples and then sail on to Sydney. The whole project tries to generate a maximum of buzz, while using a minimum of new resources. There are even workout-bikes on the Katamaran’s pontons that will be used to generate electricity.

What interests IWT first and foremost, however, is the combination of value-adding links that contributed to the news-worthyness of De Rothschild’ ideas. As there are: The Patch, linked to an eco-activist, linked to the Rothschild fame, linked to the original Kon-Tiki adventure, linked even to Thor Heyerdahls granddaughter. Josian Heyerdahl is a “consultant” on the project and will temporarily join them on the boat.

In olden times, this would have felt like a totally over-determined story. Single-mindedness was the way to go to get though in the mass media. Not anymore. Success in the social media often demands a variety of hooks for a barely aggregated readership.

That the Garbage Patch has found its place in such a multi-linked story is a good thing. Rethinking waste as material is an idea that travels better this way. But this strategy also comes with a dangerous tempation: to put more energy into crafting the story, and less into assessing the feasibility of the actual project. The Plastiki was supposed to set sail months ago, and at this moment, it still only cuts through digital waters is a lavish 3-D animation on the website. Glimpsing at the National Geopgraphic blog that is covering the preparations, it seems that using used and fragile water bottles to withstand the grind of a 10.000 mile-long ocean traversion might be a noble idea, but not a safe one.

We wish him luck.

The actual journey will be covered on its own website, and on facebook and twitter, but also at Nickelodeon. National Geographic Adentureare is even supposed to have a fulltime blogger standing by.

BTW: It’s always a good time to follow me on Twitter :-)

———————

Further links:

Self-Promo Video on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDWzb-iKZE8

Nice article in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/11/sailing-plastiki-david-de-rothschild