Archive for the ‘Influencer’ Category
Monday, November 19th, 2012
Genotypes of an organism are inherited instructions carried within the Organisms genetic Code. Where as Phenotypes of an organism are what is resulted from Organisms genes as well as the influence of environmental factors and the interactions between the two.
From Wikipedia -
The interaction between genotype and phenotype has often been conceptualized by the following relationship:
- genotype (G) + environment (E) → phenotype (P)
A more nuanced version of the relationship is:
-
genotype (G) + environment (E) + genotype & environment interactions (GE) → phenotype (P)
In the world of Entrepreneurship, Accelerators, & Incubators, no matter how great the mentorship is, how great the ecosystem is, ultimate success of the startup still depends on the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurs ability to respond to the ecosystem. Accelerators only empower the right entrepreneur.
That’s conventional conclusion and thinking;
What’s missing in the above argument is the relevant “qualification” of the ecosystem. For example just because a mentor is great at what he does or has been a successful serial entrepreneur, doesn’t mean that the mentor can create right support for a specific entrepreneur;
Entrepreneur’s ability to learn, grow and get influenced has as much bearing on him as it is on the accelerator and its ecosystem.
Most of the accelerators pick mentors and advisors from their connections and networks well before they even know the entrepreneurs, their startup concepts and their needs & strengths. While the new accelerator model (assuming the 1990s version is original/older version aka IdeaLabs, etc) is less than a decade old, there has not been enough progress with respect to mentors, advisors and ecosystem customization based on individual entrepreneurs and enterpreneur’s startup ideas. Some of these accelerators get away by saying that we are investing in the entrepreneur rather than their idea – while there is some validity in that argument but am sorry, “no cigar”!
Since 2011 and 2012 we are starting to see industry specific accelerators – for industry such as Health Care IT, Fashion Tech, FinTech, Entreprise, etc. While these might address some of the problems common in generalist accelerators (by bringing specific mentors in a particular industry or sector), they also bring their own set of challenges and problems.
Going back to mentors and advisors, best way to improve the accelerator model is to start focusing on mentors & advisors as well – not just on entrepreneurs.
Here are some recommendations -
- Some Mentors and advisors should be changed for each semester based on the entrepreneurs, their backgrounds and their startup ideas.
- Mentors and Advisors should be accountable for their contribution – not just at the equity/compensation level, but some open/independent review of their contribution to the ecosystem.
- Mentors and Advisors cannot be part of the management or shareholders of the Accelerators – this creates a conflict of interest for the management to be critical of mentor’s performance/actual contribution.
- Mentors/Advisors who are also investors also creates weird situations – for the entrepreneur who is getting mentorship and the management. This scenario needs to reviewed appropriately – on a case by case basis.
@Vsistla
Tags: Advisor, BioMimicry, Entrepreneur, Genotypes, Mentors, Startups, TechStars, Y Combinator
Posted in Accelerators, Advisor, BioMimicry, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Incubators, Influencer, Innovation, Professional Connections, Startup, Statistics, TechStars, Y Combinator | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
As many of the active LinkedIn users are aware, LinkedIn’s latest feature – social endorsement of “Skills & Expertise” – is in later stage of its beta release and growing like rapid fire in the past few weeks. What’s interesting is LinkedIn brought social validation by your network to this feature they started testing since Feb of 2012 – a social proof for your skills and expertise.
After studying this feature for a few days, I decided to do few social experiments & surveys and my past few weeks of results have been nothing short of eye openers – with respect to user behaviors. While my data set is only limited to my own network, I am quite certain these results would be very akin to majority of LinkedIn users.
While most people endorse as a social convention – “you scratch my back and I scratch your back” – very much similar to how most of us used LinkedIn Recommendations, unlike LinkedIn “Recommendations”, skill endorsements can be removed any time you want after you endorse.
Similar to tweenage kids, I am already seeing immature behavior – where people endorse skills and delete the endorsements if you don’t endorse them back or if you don’t endorse them as many as they endorsed you.
Also, from a sheer value standpoint, an individual’s recommendation for you will always be more valuable than that individual’s endorsement, even though in the long run, # of credible endorsements speak a lot about you than recommendations.
Here are some of my thoughts and conclusions around this social experiment -
- Reciprocity seems like an unspoken rule – This seems to be an overwhelming expectation – with my own direct experience as well as with people I spoke with regarding endorsements. Times when people solicit you to endorse them in return for their endorsements and other times they straight up harras you. This is very much akin to some of the spammers in the world of Twitter – You follow me and I will follow you.
- When it comes to Endorsements, huge egos are at play – I have purposely ignored to see what would happen if I didn’t “endorse back” someone who deserves some endorsements. To my surprise, their original endorsements have been removed after few days! This is a big shocker for me.
- Mutual friends & partiality in endorsements don’t get along – When you rate two peers inconsistently on skills they both pride themselves (like endorse Product manager to only one even though both of them are equally good and skilled at Product management), you start a pissing contest – most of the time without any straight confrontation.
- That’s not a skill I am proud off – re-endorse me! – Thanks to LinkedIn’s auto recommendation of skills based on your profile, most of the people I spoke to were unhappy about some of the skills that were automatically chosen for them. I heard one person contemplating to contact all the people who endorsed him on a particular skill to re-endorse for some other more relevant skill. Another wished he could change the skill text without losing the endorsements for that skill.
So, how can LinkedIn make these endorsements more credible and experience less controversial/painful? While it is too soon to conclude where the crowd sourced endorsements could go for LinkedIn, here are some recommendations -
- Endorsements are not same as Follow! – People should not be endorsing others and then remove them the next day. If they are not sure about endorsing someone, they should not endorse to begin with.
- If you insist on leaving “undo” feature, then at least insist on getting rational feedback on why someone wants to undo their endorsement just a few days after they endorsed that person.
- For Credibility, lets focus on Quality than Quantity- LinkedIn can make these endorsements more credibility by offering rich data around individual endorsements and individual motives behind endorsements. Such as -
- Displaying # of endorsements given vs # of endorsements got will give you some understanding of the value of endorsements.
- Publish like an Endorsement Gradient that is calculated based on – # of endorsements given by those who did not get an endorsement vs # of endorsements given by those who got an endorsement.
- Maybe an infographic about who (as in relationship – professional or personal) actually endorsed to learn why they endorsed – if all your endorsements are coming from your family members or close friends who never worked with you, then we know how valuable your endorsements are.
- Percentile the endorsements by skill or overall – When you crowd source people to endorse, some kind of percentile for individual skill endorsements or total endorsements – based on industry, education qualification, # of years of experience, etc – would be very useful.
- Educate your users that endorsements are not social convention! – This is very important. When someone on the street says hello to you, you say hello back to them – that is social convention. Endorsements should not be social convention. Period! Educate your users with proper “coach marks” and alerts.
As per LinkedIn users, to create more credibility for your endorsements, stick to following principles -
- Tell your endorsors to only endorse if they feel strongly about it. You do the same.
- Tell your endorsors that you will not be reciprocating them back. Reiterate that endorsements should not fit social convention. If they try to obligate you, be polite and say that you don’t know enough about them on that particular skill to endorse.
As per endorsing me, take a wild guess!
@Vsistla
Tags: Facebook, Linkedin, Online Communities, Skill, Skills & Expertise, Social network, Twitter
Posted in Anthropology, Attention, Crowd Sourcing, Customers, Endorsements, Follow, Gamification, Influencer, Innovation, Linkedin, Motivators, Professional Connections, Psychology, Relationships, Social Capital, social networks, sociology, Twitter, User Behavior Data, Wisdom of crowd | No Comments »
Thursday, August 16th, 2012
Gamification methodologies such as “Leaderboard”, “Reputation”, “Badges”, “Rewards” and “Points” are very commonly implemented by startups just to encourage certain user behavior,virality, & increase activity – but not all users respond to these techniques homogeneously.
Gamify at your own peril!
Most of the time, these so called incentives deliver undue results to startups; they are like slow poison – kill user growth; you won’t even know the cause of your user’s dissatisfaction and disengagement;
Many wrong incentives happen to right users.
Let your product and its features become inherent rewards and badges for its users.
Let your user community organize around who gets benefited by the ecosystem and who gets sidelined rather than you implementing fake badges and fluffy leader boards.
For example, on Quora, many reputed and highly successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders volunteer their time and effort in enriching the content for millions of its users.
If that is case with tangible rewards, do you think they would actually get motivated by leaderboards, points and credits?
Lets take Twitter as another example. Look at the behavior patters of highest influencers, thought leaders and game changers. If you study those Twitter accounts, few things are very consistent -
- These individuals have huge twitter followers. They don’t have followers because they are actively using Twitter. They have followers because of what they have done outside/before Twitter ever came into being. For example Beyoncé Knowles has over 5 millions followers but she has only tweeted once so far. J.K. Rowling Twitter has over 1 million followers but she has sent less than 20 tweets.
- These game changers are not motivated by # of followers they can gain in Twitter. In fact some of them don’t even know that they have a huge following on Twitter.
- People who follow them – follow them for that one rare opportunity to hear what they are going to say. Millions of followers follow these “no tweet game changers” because of what they have done outside the Twitter sphere.
In the interest of higher user activity and in the name of gamification if Twitter forced its users to take an active role in their platform – by making all its users to “tweet”, Twitter would lose 50% of its user base, especially most of the “no tweet game changers”.
Twitter allows its community of users to inherently reward and gain value from other users while still not forcing any particular behavior on them.
User behavior accountability is very important for all startups and exposing/displaying some of that data with the community has many benefits to the startup as well as to the community.
Exposed user behavior data should actual benefit the community rather than spam, distract and pollute the environment.
Examples of such pollution including publishing user activity to everyone in your community and share with all social networks without explicit permission from your users.
On the other hand, there is a role for sharing some of the user behavior and profile data. For example Twitter exposes other user’s # of Followers, # of Tweets and other valuable information. Similarly Quora exposes # of Followers, # of Questions and # of Answers. Such data is useful for following reasons -
- Ability for active users to get/gain more visibility.
- Ability for other users to gain from people who are contributing to the ecosystem.
Neither Quora nor Twitter expose/display user data that humiliates or insults any particular user in front of the community. Not only that they never package or repurpose such data to show in a different form like leader board or badges.
Finally they never deprive their users of certain functionality because of such untoward activity. Remember this – when you limit product functionality based on user behavior, realize that many genuine/valuable users might get pulled in this group and that might piss off genuine users who could have otherwise become long term users.
In summary before you define your rewards, reputation points, leaderboards, badges, and or leverage user behavioral data, think of the following -
- Do Not force yours to “act” certain way to increase virality of your user base or promote your brand or increase activity in your platform. I am not saying a rule less community. Criteria for rules should not be to promote your brand(aka virality) and increase fake activity in your platform.
- When exposing your user activity to other users, in the interest of virality, please keep in mind of your user’s privacy. Most common of these is activity feeds and time lines which are common place in most of the consumer apps/platforms.
- Most of the virtual denizens do not need policing – most of the communities figure out a way to reward right behavior without the platform provider needing to police by fake incentives/rewards/leader board. Baring criminal and grossly unsavory situations, most of the time, this rule of thumb applies. Let your community deal with it.
- Not all your users will respond to incentives with same interest. Your incentives, tangible or intangible will dictate the type of users you will attract in the long run.
- Once again, your product, product benefits, its features, the value created by your users to other users should be the core incentives and motivators.
- Never ever tie your “product feature” access to user behavior data. I would use this as a general rule excluding exceptions/fringe cases/unique circumstances.
Tags: Beyoncé Knowles, Data, Facebook, Gamification, Incentives, Leaderboard, Mahalo, Motivators, Online Communities, Quora, Rewards, Social network, Twitter, User Activity, User Behavior Data, User Timeline
Posted in Badges, Customers, Gamification, Incentives, Influencer, Leader Board, Mahalo, Motivations, Motivators, Personas, Quora, Reputation, Rewards, Social Capital, Twitter, User, User Behavior Data | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 3rd, 2012
This post is not just for Social Entreprises but also for people who value relationships and those who want to put a value for relationships.
In the book Sway, authors talk about two parts of our brain that respond to altruism & material rewards and how both these parts can never work in sync and the part of the brain that gets excited about material rewards (Nucleus Accumbens)will trump the altruistic part (Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus) IF these two forces ever butt each other.
English: Reward system Français : Structures cérébrales constituant le système de récompense. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a very important concept to grapple with for most of the social entrepreneurs and social entreprises. In fact every social entreprise should clearly understand these forces before they instrument their product features, incentives & rewards.
Here is the most interesting thing – these conclusions are also consistent with non social entreprises and other conventional “do gooder” type; I have conducted my own experiments to validate that many of the following -
For example,
- Sometimes, no reward is better than some reward – In general not putting a price or reward for someone’s good actions and intensions is better than putting some price/reward in place. This has impacted my own ability to contribute at the best of my abilities in some of the personal projects I was involved in the past few years. This becomes a big issue when the reward you are given is much lesser than what your time and attention is worth. Of course, we tend to rationalize (that darn Nucleus Accumbens) as soon as someone puts a price on your deeds. It is very important for individuals to clearly understand the inherent motivations behind “do gooders”. Those inherent motivations dictate their reactions to the rewards.
- When you reward, don’t expect – In general, when you reward someone for their good deeds especially when they are doing that without any contingencies or expectations, you should not have any expectations from them especially after you reward them. Most of the time, as soon as someone rewards for your actions, they also start to set expectations on your ability to do future good deeds. This becomes a viscous cycle.
- Rewards and incentives are a tricky beast - Most people focus on “how much” they can reward for someone’s good deeds and to a lesser extent on “what”; I feel “how” the reward is defined, delivered, acknowledged and so forth is as important as how much and what the reward is. Inherently each of us are motivated by many aspects in life when we help others. You cannot define all of us with a few broad strokes. More about this in the next bullet.
- Good deeds/intensions come in all kinds of instruments- Some take “time” and other’s write a check and others donate what they don’t need. Some do physical labor, and some help on strategy and others be there for you in need. Some make the very important introduction, while others “like” or “retweet” your message. While not all of these are same, one cannot ignore the value of each of these actions. So, when your social entreprise is only accounting for a “check” then you are leaving lot of opportunity untapped.
- People who give in all kinds of instruments are as myriad as what motivates them to do – Just the way people contribute for “social good” in various instruments, people’s individual expectations (if they have any) also vary. So, taking into account all those aspects in your models is very critical. For example, someone who is motivated by being the “charitable” leader board responds to “gamification” compared to someone else who want to be anonymous.
- First give before you expect – I spend umpteen hours with many early stage startups to coach, share, learn and collaborate – without anything on paper. I strongly believe we give before we expect or take. That is how we create “value” for people around us. The more value we create for people around us, the more valuable we become. I see many Social Entreprises experimenting with interesting “charity” models – where you give something for charity for getting something back in return. Some times what you get in return for your charitable contribution is its just bragging rights and some times its lot more tangible. Different people respond to these models differently. So, it is critical social entreprises take into account all those nuances into account before they structure their charitable models.
This blog post is motivated by – the book Sway by Brafman brothers, Robyn Scott from OneLeap, Ali Ansari Professor & ex-Chairman of Engineers Without Borders, interactions with various angel investors from The Unreasonable Institute, and my own experimentations with various early stage startups and entrepreneurs.
Tags: Ali Ansari, Altruism, Charity, Engineers Without Borders, Incentive, Incentives, Motivators, Nucleus Accumbens, Rewards, Robyn Scott, Social Entreprise
Posted in Altruism, Charity, Crowd, Crowd Sourcing, Good Society, Incentives, Influencer, Innovation, Motivations, Motivators, Neocortex, Personas, Psychology, Reputation, Rewards, Social Capital, Social Entreprise, Wisdom of crowd | 3 Comments »
Friday, July 13th, 2012
Value attribution is a basic innate human behavioral tenet that superimposes characteristics and qualities of an individual or thing when we are assessing the “objective” value of the individual or thing. In other words we tend to stick with the “perceived value” of a thing or individual over its “objective value”. Our perceptions from our own culture, past experiences, diagnostic biases take over and trump our ability to assess based on the real objective values.
Value attribution phenomenon was demonstrated by Joshua Bell – one of the finest violinists and Washington Post in 2010 in Washington D.C. at a Subway station where over a 1000 people walked by without paying attention when Joshua Bell – one of the best known violinists in the world played for over 45 mins on his $3.5 Million worth violin – at a busy Subway stations in D.C. Metro.
Value attribution is all around us – every time you try to interact with someone who is more accomplished than you or in a different social strata …..some of this is very much reflected in our Zombie relationships we have built around us via social networks.
Our media industry also plays into “value attribution”. We see this in typical headlines and trade journals as well – where if someone famous or accomplished gives a sound bite, that gets more visibility and credibility than someone who is nobody although both of them concluded the same thing. Specifically when I was a research analyst early 2000s anything I said was picked up as a quote and listed here and here but no one cares two hoots even if I had said something more profound via my blogs or otherwise without such a credible “qualification”.
How is “value attribution” related to startups, entrepreneurs and investors?
Well, let me tell you that its spread intravenously through out the entire industry – for worse.
Entrepreneurs:
Whether you are a first time entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur, you do face negative and positive biases respectively that adversely affect you, regardless of the bias.
For first time entrepreneurs, most investors – angels and VCs alike have a negative bias for the inexperienced and lack of credibility. The mentality is if you didn’t do this before why would we invest in you and take a bigger risk.
Where as for a seasoned or more than once entrepreneur – angels & VCs – especially those who have already invested or saw the entrepreneur execute in the past – give a positive bias – and are lot more inclined to invest. Most investors are ignorant of the fact that success is not fungible and every startup would have similar as well as unique challenges. Millions of investor dollars go in the gutter because of positive bias towards serial entrepreneurs.
Investors:
For one of my previous startups, many investors have told me that they would only invest in entrepreneurs with whom they have worked in the past.
While taking the “known devil is better than the unknown god” approach works in most cases, I am willing to bet that statistically investors might lose “more” on startups that they have not invested but should have than the startups they have invested based on the “value attributions”.
Investors – angels as well as VCs alike give higher weight towards existing relationships, past experiences & emotionally charged biases when they deal with known entrepreneurs. On the flip side, they go the other extreme when they deal with first time entrepreneurs with perceived biases.
Investor or entrepreneur or just about anyone – approach all your interactions with people (strangers or friends) around you as if its a privilege for you to interact with them!
Especially first time entrepreneurs should create interesting avenues and opportunities to overshadow “value attribution” that they will inevitably face when they want to build their startup and do fund raising. There is no check list I can provide but will tell you that its your mind set and perspective that will help you overcome this dogma.
Tags: Business, Entrepreneur, Investor, Joshua Bell, Relationships, Startup company, Subway, Value Attribution, Washington D.C, Washington Post
Posted in Angel Investor, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Influencer, Innovation, Investing, Investors, Psychology, Relationships, sociology, Startup, Value Attribution, Venture Capitalist | No Comments »
Monday, May 9th, 2011
Image via CrunchBase
Every Twitter user has a specific role, goal, objective and purpose in the Twitter”o”sphere.
Not all Twitter users have same motivations and goals. Some user’s objectives fit “hand in glove” with other users while some other’s conflict with others. Regardless everyone contributes to the Twitter”o”sphere – even those who have not sent a single tweet out into the ether!
At the end of the day, every Twitter user – hopes and seeks to gain something from the Twitter”o”sphere. Some try to gain influence, while others try to show that they are in the know. Some try to beat the establishment in breaking the news, while others try to read that same breaking news. Some try to engage in one word conversations with thought leaders while others be bystanders and enjoy the repartee’ …..
Twitteronomics!
Similarly each of these users have their own motivations and not all the motivations are aligned or equal. They are very subjective to their own roles in the society and goals/objectives. While a student beat’s the news media in tweeting a breaking news, rest of the beat reporters tweet only after they can drive traffic to their publishing properties. While a stock picking guru with a large following will only tweet about it after he took a (stock trade) position, another day trader will tweet to artificially pump their picks. Political party A tweets to smear party B and party B tweets to clean up the mess.
What’s important about all this is to learn about underlying objectives and motivators of Twitter users – before you act on the message. Make sure their underlying objectives and motivators are in alignment with yours before you respond to the message. For example, you should know if a stock picking guru is tweeting about a trade because its a good buy or because he took a position and trying to get the whole world to pump the stock up; if a watchdog group is spreading smut about a political candidate based on facts or because they have been funded by the opposing political party.
Motivators also change based on content and context. For example – messages that are newsworthy – are typically shared right away where as messages with specific individual actionable benefits are tweeted only after the user benefited/acted on them. For example a tweet about a hot airline deal to Hawaii is only shared after the user consumed it or cannot get any more marginal benefit from that news;
There will be times when you might not be able to tell the Twitter user’s underlying motivations and objectives. Its best not to act on such messages until you get similar directions/guidance from other users.
I would define Twitteronomics as the study of Twitter users, their motivators, objectives & goals based on their individual subjective forces, content being shared and the context.
Opinions expressed are mine own ….
@Vsistla
Tags: Influence, Online Communities, Reputation, Trending and Popularity, Tweet, Tweeter, Twitter
Posted in Attention, Customers, Influencer, Motivators, Real Time, Social Capital, Tweet, Tweeter, Twitter, User | No Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Every time we stumble upon a new concept, we extrapolate its use cases across everything we can imagine only to realize that it doesn’t work in every instance! While some other times, we bring those use cases to market much sooner than the market is ready for them. Whether it is the most advanced hard disk drive – Kitty Hawk- from HP in early 1990s, or video streaming in the mid 1990s or online adv supported dot.com ventures in late 1990s, we have left a trail of such untimely ventures in the past.
Welcome to Social TV!Social TV is in its infancy and its good to understand the rules of Social TV based on current market conditions, limitations and end user’s expectations. These rules might not be relevant once the market matures with a different ecosystem than the early days of Social TV.
I define Social TV is an interactive television viewing experience with one or more individuals who are not co-located.
These groups of viewers can not only interact with each other via Television but also with any other devices. In case of certain genre shows such as reality TV or live competition, active social TV viewers can easily influence others in their voting/sentiment.
TV watching has been a fairly lonely experience until now. With connected TVs hitting over 40 million sales by the end of 2011, it doesn’t have to be a only experience. That was also one of the reasons why more youth are spending majority of their time Online rather than watching TV – despite good quality and compelling content.
- When you are in the theater
Social TV is akin to going to movies with a bunch of your friends without Shhing …..and turning off your cell phones while watching.
At least a “pinch hit” substitute for going to movies.
That said, these are the basic rules of Social TV.
- Social TV is not for everyone – Social TV is a very interactive and passive experience unlike traditional TV viewing. Most of us are accustomed to this passive experience and might not take to Social TV experience as some of the younger generations might. So, there will be some significant parity between how each generation approaches Social TV. Industry should be mindful of such generational parities in building their Social TV platforms.
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- Social TV is not for every type of content/show/movie – Just the way not all types of content evokes similar/same reaction and engagement, Social TV is not for every time of content. Social TV is ideal for content that is inherently debatable, passionate with high emotions and opinionated.
- Social TV is most compelling when it gives a strong enough reason for the audience to change their viewing patterns and behavior! – Social TV is not just about chatting and interacting with other viewers. Social TV should be able to change the user behavior – at its fundamental level. For example- People who are fans of a show who watch the show in “time shift mode” should find compelling reasons to watch the show “live” along with thousands and millions of other fans. That would dictate the success of Social TV.
- Social TV with well-thought through privacy options is very critical. Privacy will be one of the cornerstones of Social TV. Your entertainment viewing options would have profound impact on who wants to be your friend and how close they want to maintain their friends with you. Social TV adds another source of information – about you – to your friends. Your reputation, persona, personality, priorities, values and principles get re-evaluated in the eyes of the world. So, privacy becomes that much more important.
- Social TV should be non intrusive – should not spoil the experience of watching the show or movie. Done right, Social TV should not negatively impact the viewing experience. If anything, it should enhance it.
- Social TV gets interesting when there are two or more sides/teams/parties – aka – Sports is the most apt genre for Social TV. Yes – Social TV thrives when there are sides, teams, emotions and passions. Sports content is most suitable for Social TV interactions.
- Social TV is not just socializing while watching TV ….its also bringing TV to social networks and online communities. Social TV brings conversations from online/web to your living room. Your Online communities enter your living room.
- Conversation is the engine between social TV – content is just a topic at hand! That’s correct – Social TV enables the conversations, heated and passionate debates in real time instead of waiting until the Water Cooler moment the next day morning.
- Image by dennis -Nothing to talk at Water Coolers – via Flickr
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- Social TV thrives on the principle that we often look to others when we make media consumption decisions. We are less hardwired about these decisions than life changing/serious decisions
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- We are heavily influenced by the people in our physical space than remote. So, your social interactions vary based on who and how many are around you while watching TV. You might interact lot more with your remote buddies when you are watching TV alone versus with someone in the room. As George Custanza from Seinfeld would say, the “World’s Could Collide” that might lead to interesting scenarios - based on type of conversations and your company in the living room.
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- People care deeply about how they look to others! Social TV is no different – if users don’t have appropriate tools to control how they are perceived by others, Social TV will die. Humans self-censor and we cannot live without it ….
- Social TV is most suited for Sporting Events, Live Events and Reality Television – Based on above rules and scenarios, I feel Social TV is most suited for Sporting, Live and Reality TV Content - in that order.
Tags: Arts, Conversations, Interactive, Interactive television, Privacy, Reality Television, Seinfeld, Social network, Social TV, Sports Content, Streaming media, Television
Posted in Apple TV, Apps, Attention, Broadcasters, Customers, Facebook, Home, Influencer, Information Age, Innovation, Internet, iTV, Over the top, Privacy, Real Time, Reputation, Social Capital, Social Grooming, social networks, Social TV, sociology, Twitter, virtual world | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 14th, 2009
If you have not read Cory Doctorow’s fascinating book – Magic Kingdom – and/or Tara Hunt’s run away hit book – The Whuffie Factor – you must be thinking of something uncouth when I say “How big is your Whuffie?”
Whuffie is a brand new currency ……..well, you might not be able to buy your next Latte ….at least not right away ….but certainly in a few years ……..
Whuffie ….is your online reputation …..your influence …..your social capital …your clout …and your personal bling bling……
Want to know your Whuffie? Just go to thewhuffiebank.org and check it out.
TheWhuffieBank.org just launched few months – is one of the 50 TechCrunch finalists – is a non-profit venture started by – Santiago Siri, Martin Anazco, Martin Mac Donell, Diego Meller, & Emiliano Kargieman.
If you want to know more about Whuffie enthusiasts and its activities via Meetup, please join this brand new group http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Whuffie-Group/
Already, there are over 5 million people checking their Whuffie and I am currently ranked somewhere in between 2 Million and 3 Million.
May your Whuffie grow by leaps and bounds,
Vamsi Sistla
NOTE: Opinions expressed in all my blogs are my own and not of anyone else including my employer.
Tags: Attention, Cory Doctorow, Facebook, Influence, Reputation, Retwits, sms, Social Capital, Tara Hunt, Twitter, Whuffie
Posted in Attention, Facebook, Influencer, Reputation, Social Capital, social networks, Twitter, Whuffie | No Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
In geek speak, I am saying that Dunbar # has less to do with # of Social Network Connection one might have to generate meaningful relationships ….
When I read Seth Godin’s blog about Dunbar number this morning, it got me thinking ……
Seth’s blog
Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren’t cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That’s why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It’s why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building).
Facebook and Twitter and blogs fly in the face of Dunbar’s number. They put hundreds or thousands of friendlies in front of us, people we would have lost touch with (why? because of Dunbar!) except that they keep digitally reappearing.
I am not qualified to comment on Dunbar’s reasoning with respect to human “neocortex” limitations to maintain social relationship, but I feel Dunbar was trying to say something else and has less to do with number of (useful and productive) social connections one might have in the 21st century. Somehow his core research on tribal formations and groups got dragged into the current generation social networking paradigms.
Going along with the assumption that Dunbar’s # can be used in the context of current generation Social Networking ……. here are my thoughts.
According to Wikipedia, Dunbar got to this number with this kind of research/analysis, amongst others …
Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.
Regardless of whether an individual is able to build a cohesive relationship with all the 500+ Linkedin or Facebook connections or not, lets analyze Dunbar’s analysis.
1. 150 is the mean number concluded based on historic tribal group sizes – from the hunter-gatherer societies.
That is fundamentally a flawed argument – because the limitations, challenges and ways of life are so different between the hunter-gatherer society and the 21st century.
- In that era people got out of their beds (realistically patches of grass in their caves) for survival and sustenance and current generation human to grow up the Maslow’s pyramid.
2. Dunbar is talking about 150 as the size for the groups to have incentive to “remain together”.
- Current generation social networkers are not planning to “remain together” when they add their friends. Eschewing the real motivations and reasons for someone to “add” new friends(maybe in another blog), I am certain it is not to “remain together”.
3. Dunbar concludes that 42% of an individuals time is spent towards social grooming and nearly all the people in these tribes are physically close.
- While being physically close was a must in the tribal era, but it is not necessary in the 21st century to build and maintain value add relationships. Thanks to technological innovation, social grooming should not take 50% of your day’s activity.
4. Dunbar does conclude that “language” as one of the tools for early humans to do social grooming. In fact he concludes that because of language, humans have a bigger Dunbar number than primates. This again proves my point that – on top of language, we have many other tools – that let us build “valuable” social relationships – albeit virtual – potentially increasing the Dunbar limit of 150.
PS: Please note that above data points about Dunbar are taken from Wikipedia.
PS: I have not read Dunbar’s book – Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language.
Disclaimer – Opinions expressed are my own and not of my employer.
Tags: Anthropology, Dunbar, Facebook, Groups, Linkedin, social networks, Tribes, Twitter
Posted in Anthropology, anti-social, Dunbar, Facebook, Influencer, Linkedin, Social Grooming, social networks, sociology, Tribes, Twitter, virtual world | No Comments »
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
Few days back I went to NYPL Live with my friend Caroline Waxler to listen to Lawrence Lessig, Shepard Fairey & Steven Johnson (Twitter’s 35th rank).
Shepard with his Obama photo remix has ignited an age old debate between creative artists and bureaucrats.
While the focus of the session was on remix of music, video and art, I realized that we live in an age of remix!
Most of the religious that sprung up in the past millennium have their origins from older religious. As Thomas Friedman put it, with the world becoming flat, different races, religious and cultures are remixing and creating their own versions.
Royal chariot remixed into a farmer’s cart centuries ago …….
Science, awareness and opportunities are bulldozing the age old dogmatic barriers of the hierarchical societies.
Seal and Heidi Klum are remixing; 
Taye Diggs and Idina Mendel are remixing; Eva Longoria and Tony Parker are remixing;
Tiger Woods has remixed twice.
Remix has been part of our DNA since the advent of primordial soup – only now, we kicked it up a few notches.
In 2008 two bloggers Robin and Danielle ran contests for Recipe Remixes – and many people flooded them with their morphed up remixed recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Arfi, an Indonesian living in New Zealand has created remix Crepes. 
Remixing is part of our evolution! Remix is innovation!Remix is normal![polldaddy poll=1412116]
Out of every 50 twits I get, 10% are retwits with a twist of their – again a remix!
Viral videos in a completely different context is a type of its own remix.
Can you think of any other interesting remixes?Remixes that have influenced the society, culture and religion?
For example -
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AutoRisk – a remix of Scooter + Rikshaw
Tags: art, Heidi Klum, Lawrence Lessig, music, obama, remix, Retwits, Seal, Shepard Fairey, Steven Johnson, Thomas Friedman, Tiger Woods, Twitter
Posted in Influencer, sociology, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, January 19th, 2009
People are constantly influenced by their surrounding and other people around them in their decision making. This is the fact of life for many centuries. Call it osmosis or institutionalization or mores of a society (stone age to modern civilization), people do not make their decisions in isolation – no matter how important or trivial the decisions are.
My first car in America was VW Fox – my friend Matt Guernsey helped me in making a decision to buy it – at a Seven Eleven shop in Pontiac, Michigan for $2000. Until that point, I never heard of Volkswagen.
[polldaddy poll=1288778]
My father and mother have influenced me to take up engineering and technology right from my 6th grade and that led me to become an engineer. The three universities I applied for my Masters were chosen based on three personal connections I had in those universities.
We all have forced and inadvertent influencer’s in our lives. Over the centuries, the art of influencing has moved from inadvertent methods to forced and intentional techniques. Mass market outlets such as televisions, newspapers, banner posters and radio have used influencer’s to sway our decision making in a particular direction.
How does inadvertent influencing happen? – I guess as the name sounds, you get influenced by someone who you look up to and try to emulate them or follow in similar paths.
Am sure Columbus or Vasco da Gama were influenced by someone in their society to take up sailing/exploration to distant lands. I am sure Shakespeare was influenced by his distant uncle or a contemporary poet. Most of musician’s kids gets influenced by their parents to take up music and dance.
[polldaddy poll=1288741]
Then, what about forced or intentional influencing? For lack of better, this is equivalent to constant brain washing – directly or indirectly. Through mass media outlets, leveraging celebrity and experts to influence has been the biggest side serving of 19th and 20th century technological innovations.
There are common characteristics for these two influencers – these two are very unstructured. Both of them leverage emotional capital while the earlier version has higher personal touch to it.
Enter Structured Influencing ……
With the advent of Internet, Web and infinite sources of information, data and access, we are moving towards structured and impersonal influencing ……one has access to oodles of statistics, metrics, reviews, and information to make their decisions – via the web – no matter how trivial or crucial the decision is. Whether you shop at Amazon or Netflix or watch at YouTube or Hulu or plan your evening via Yelp or CitySearch – collective knowledge and experience can suggest you the best options based on wisdom of crowds.
Out goes the personal touch and emotional capital in influencing ….how bad or good is this? What are the long term sociological implications of impersonal influencing?
Ideation and Opportunities of Improvement -
While there is lot of information on the web, its time to qualify that for better decision making. Reviews on Amazon or Netflix or Youtube are good but who is rating or keeping track of the reviewers and the quality of reviews they offer?
Reviews have rating and ranking but I have not seen reviewers with similar yard stick. Filtering the reviews by the quality/rating/ranking of the reviewers is also very important.
Tags: Rating, Review
Posted in Influencer, Metadata, social networks, sociology, Web, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
