By taking what many would consider a form of work, and turning it into a game, my friends older brother was able to manipulate his behaviour and create an opportunity that was more compelling than watching TV. The art of taking a task and turning it into a game is popularly referred to as gamification, and the principles that make games engaging, compelling and which steer our behaviour are an emerging field known as game mechanics. A time based challenge is one form of game mechanic of which there are many. Other popular examples include a progression dynamic (think progress bar) and status (title or ranking, as compared with others).

In her fabulous TED Talk “Gaming can change the World”, Futurist Jane McGonigal explained how the best computer games create profoundly satisfying learning experiences, where gamers work very hard, blissfully, with high levels of concentration, skill and productivity to complete tasks in virtual worlds. Her ideas are grounded in hard research; World of Warcraft, the most popular multi-user role playing game, sports over 12 million subscribers globally who play for an average of 22 hours per week and collectively complete over 16 million quests per day. Farmville, the most popular social game playable via Facebook, has over 80 million monthly users, generating in excess of US $1m dollars in daily revenue for it’s creator Zynga.

Jane McGonigal explains that, the best games use a blend of stories, social structures and feedback loops to give tasks meaning that make them fun to complete, and that the principles that make people work hard in virtual worlds represents our best opportunity to get vast swathes of our population to team up, work harder and literally save the World. She believes that, if we can repurpose the cognitive surplus in society by using game mechanics to change individual behaviour en-masse, we can build a better society. She predicts that, by 2023, a game designer will win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Mobile technology is blurring the interface between games and reality, and game mechanics are already being used effectively to influence group behaviour. For example, Foursquare is a location based mobile game that involves users showing up in various locations and checking in using their mobile phone. By playing, users earn real rewards (such as discount vouchers) and virtual rewards (such as badges and titles) and social rewards (like status). Since Foursquare launched in March 2009, it has amassed over 5 million users and the collective population of Foursquare is now crowd sourcing location based wisdom to help people determine where is good to go in their locale. The rapid user adoption rate and utility has led to the World Economic Forum declaring Foursquare as a Technology Pioneer for 2011.

When you consider the technology costs of yesteryear, society is getting wealthier in terms of technology at rate that far exceeds economic growth. For example, adjusted for inflation, in terms of cost per megabyte, hard drives were approx 16 million percent more expensive in 1998 than 2008, and in terms of cost per megaflop (measure of CPU number crunching power), processors in 1984 were 2 billion percent more expensive than processors in 2009. The increased capabilities available at lower costs are driving many smarter uses of technology throughout society; and based upon research published by Gartner, in the first two quarters of 2010, sales of Smartphones increased by 50%. These smartphones can run a variety of apps, games, access the Internet and most include GPS technology for location based services. According to Jupiter Research, it is estimated that by 2014, over half of mobile phone users will make payments via their phones, and over 1.5 billion people will own smart mobile phones with GPS technology.

The parallel trends of declining costs of technology, increased connectivity, more people figuring out better uses for technology and new models for user engagement are changing the basis of how society operates. Over the last decade, mobile phones have been used to make TV more interactive; Reality TV shows use text message based voting to allow viewers to collectively decide what happens, and occasionally participate and win prizes. More recently, Web 2.0 technologies are allowing data to be shared in ways that better harnesses and serves the needs and wisdom of the crowd, for example, Facebooks API lets Zynga create social games that can be played within Facebook. A variety of algorithms operate like mini-user voting engines such as Facebook’s open graph protocol that uses the number of “likes” as a factor to help determine ranking in it’s search engine, and on YouTube, where the most watched videos become more findable. These voting mechanisms are so efficient and agile that their existence should spur a re-examination of our political structures, in light of what technology makes possible.

Modern marketers must take heed of how computers, tablets and mobile phones are quickly becoming our most popular interface with information in our World, and learn new or updated ways to add value in a connected society. In terms of engagement, passive marketing cannot compete with interactive marketing, just as a good one way message cannot compete with a good feedback loop. A lot of marketers know what they need to do to get a press release to be featured in a national newspaper, but don’t have a clue how to create a video that gets 100,000+ views on YouTube in a short period of time, or how to set up an email auto responder that sends subscribers a different email depending on their actions. In the future, you won’t have a chance unless your marketing process is data-driven. Google has more data about modern psychology of the World than any other organisation, based upon a 2 year anonymised archive of what everyone searches for and uses this data to keep growing and winning more business. Zynga has figured out from it’s 80 million Farmville users how to sequence challenge, reward and social integration at just the right level to become so addictive that 18% of users play Farmville every day.

As the cost of achieving anything with technology decreases, a huge opportunity emerges to do business better. The most developed domain of how to engage, manage and steer attention and make competing tasks fun is using games. The games industry has developed such power and traction in society that in 2009 in the UK, 40% more money was spent on games than on movies. Now you can learn from the games industry, and as a modern marketer, apply principles of game mechanics to get better results in business. Simple examples include building progress dynamics (like a progress bar) into a checkout mechanism on a website (to make people more likely to complete a checkout process), to using competitions that engage your customers in thinking about your product, to measuring the productivity of your staff, and based upon a variety of metrics, rewarding them with points, virtual items such as badges and titles, to orient their psychology to progress to becoming higher perfomers as they work.

If you want to further validate these possibilities for yourself, find a teenager, and quiz them about how motivated they are to succeed in school versus how motivated they are to play games. Then ask them, if school became a giant computer game, do they think they could learn more and would they spend more time learning?

As society evolves, game mechanics are going to pervade more areas of our lives, because they work so well, they will ultimately become part of our interface with information, leading to a more connected society, that leverages fun, psychological and data driven principles to get everyone to engage and participate more.

When you blend game mechanics, connected technologies, capitalism and democracy, you will find our society becomes a Gameocracy. To succeed within it, you’ll have to play to win.

(as published in The Digital Times)

In the two and a half years he’s been publishing his show online, Ray’s videos have clocked up close to half a billion total views. Whenever he releases a new video, within a week it gets watched by more than 3 million people.

To put these figures in context, the Irish Times, a publication founded over 150 years ago with a turnover of over €100m and a whole team of writers, editors, researchers and designers claims to have a total monthly readership (at home and abroad) of 2.3 million.

In an age where most traditional media outlets are in decline, in the last twelve months, the total subscribers to Ray’s YouTube channel have increased by over 800% to over 2 million people. Ray started out with no budget, (and even now his entire show could be produced using kit worth less than €5000) yet in less than three years, he has amassed more regular viewers than the Irish Times.

How is this possible?

Technology is all about tools, and a tool, by definition, makes performing any given task easier. When you combine multiple tools and technologies together, whole paradigm shifts occur, and as a result, what was arduous, slow and expensive less than a decade ago is easy, quick and cheap in 2010 for those who are technologically fluent.

Rays formula is simple yet ingenius. He crowdsources popular viral videos (videos are recommended to him by his fans) and uses free statistical tools (like viewer statistics on YouTube) to analyse these same videos to calibrate their popularity. Once he identifies a couple of great viral videos that are proven to be loved by the market, he extracts clips of the best parts, and then records himself reviewing these clips with an irreverent style of humour. Finally, Ray edits his commentary and the viral video clip extracts together with a few comments from his fans, to create a satisfyingly entertaining show.

Over time, Ray has built up a reputation and trust with an online audience who have discovered his episodes to be consistently buzz-worthy, a key quality that leads friends to show viral content to other friends. Each episode, being three to five minutes long, is short enough to fit the preferred consumption patterns of modern busy consumers with limited attention spans and a perceived lack of time. By distributing his videos via YouTube, he can syndicate his episodes globally to computer and smartphone users, who watch his videos at any time of the day or night at no cost. His success is assisted by incredible growth of YouTube and the growing use of social networks, where in a few clicks, Facebook and Twitter users can link to and make their own comments about Rays latest episode.

Ray’s success is possible because he researches and gives modern consumers what they want and are naturally inclined to share. They keep coming back for more, and sharing his episodes. In this way, he expertly leverages the power of social media.

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

Consumer paradigm shifts, driven by technology, have changed the culture of how people engage with brands and each other, and how individuals and groups consume, share and co-create information.

The tools and methodologies that Ray uses are available to everyone at low or no cost, however, just as owning a supercar doesn’t make a person a good driver, the existence of a plethora of free research, communication and content creation tools, doesn’t mean that most marketing managers will use them well, or even, will use them at all. Many marketers are so intimidated by and/or in awe of the rate of change in the World and resulting novelties, they struggle to think with calm, strategic, technological fluency. As a consequence, most under-utilise easy opportunities to do business better in 2010. While technology makes it easier, quicker and cheaper to identify what modern consumers want and to communicate with them on their terms, the hard part is learning to do business in a different way. It requires that marketers reclassify themselves as novices, and apply conscious effort and an attitude of curiosity and open-mindedness to learn anew what works and how to do business differently as necessitated by the new communications environment.

Ray’s success is possible because of the people he is competing have, thus far, been less effective than him in keeping with changing times.

Anti Social Media

Many forms of traditional media, distributed via traditional outlets, are clunky compared with their modern counterparts.

Young people, who are less entrenched in traditional ways of doing things, tend to adapt faster and figure out how to leverage new technology sooner than older generations. In the 1990’s, this created a phenomena of grandparents asking their grandchildren to operate their VCRs. In 2010, this creates a phenomenon of younger people figuring out technologies that underpin the fabric of modern society sooner than older generations, while older generations include most of the leaders and decision makers who choose what happens. The tendency of older generations is to create expensive content, that is difficult to share and ill-fitting with the lifestyles and consumption patterns of modern consumers; you can call their outputs anti-social media.

So if you think in terms of books instead of blogs, if you figure you can catch up by attending a seminar instead of watching tutorials on YouTube and Vimeo, if your strategy to keep up to date is to read magazines instead of looking at Twitter, if you don’t know how to run advanced searches on Google, don’t be surprised if you struggle to compete and sooner or later, your business goes past it’s sell by date.

The good news is, you have a choice, and by leveraging the opportunities created by modern technology and social media, by learning the ways of listening, engaging and giving consumers content that is easy, entertaining and satisfying to consume (like brief summary videos with sincere engaging presenters), you can gain a very worthwhile competitive advantage. The best way to learn about social media is to use it for this purpose! The productivity gains afforded by expertly harnessing modern tools and social media, means that, all other factors being equal, businesses who don’t use such tools will not be able to compete with those that do.

I encourage you to embrace a spirit of adventure and discovery, reclassify yourself from being an expert to a novice so you are spurred to keep learning every day, and just like great explorers of old, you may find treasure that comes in the form of growing your business at rates previously thought of as impossible, despite changing and challenging times. For in a World where the rate of change keeps increasing, the agile will be the champions of the future.

(as published in The Digital Times)

The book is rich with examples of smart social psychology… before talking to the girl he wanted, he’d orchestrate situations to make sure she got to see him surrounded by other women, so he’d appear to be in demand… on dates he’d bring her to several different locations so she’d have the experience of leaving and arriving with him again and again.

After much dedicated learning, Neil became a the guy who was able to attract and date many of the hottest women he met, including A-list celebrities. A few months after his book became a best seller, he sold a set of 8 DVD’s for $4000 each (online) grossing $1.4 million in a couple of days, to guys who sought to follow in his footsteps.

Social Transformation

Many marketers are now faced with the daunting prospect of going through an equivalent journey of social transformation as Neil Strauss. Due the evolution of possibility, driven by technology, the rules of the game of business and marketing have changed. The connected, information rich environment we live in today, means you now are marketing to “Consumers 2.0”; individuals who have learned it pays to be proactive, who have discovered that a little bit of searching online can save them a fortune and help them find solutions to unanswerable problems.

Consumers now input more information, via more channels, than ever before. As a result, the latent psychological ability of humans to recognise patterns they are repeatedly exposed to has led to consumers becoming increasingly conscious that most marketing messages, by nature, involve a conflict of interest, and by default, shouldn’t be entirely trusted. They have developed a kind of evolutionary scepticism and distrust of and desensitisation to traditional marketing. The patterns of influence, used by traditional marketers, are losing their power.

“Peer Endorsement Is The Single Greatest Decision Accelerant”

The effect of the evolutionary, information-rich environment, where consumers have more access to knowledge and choice than ever before, is they often experience too many choices information overwhelm and overload. As many people do when faced with a problem that they can’t solve, modern consumers get online to search for answers. With a natural scepticism of anyone who is trying to sell them stuff, they find they can get often more trustworthy advice from the individual and collective wisdom of their peers, who share their experiences without a conflict of interest. For many, the efforts of consulting this body of knowledge is negligible compared to the rewards of making better decisions. Consequently, social media (and enabling technologies) fundamentally change the decision-data upon which consumers base their choices, which in turn changes the way consumers make decisions.

Modern consumers often find it socially satisfying to upload and share the results of their decisions with each other, creating an ever richer body of knowledge online that, in aggregate, functions like a giant decision-support-engine for overwhelmed consumers.
Forces combined, the increased number of channels through which consumers are connected together, the decreased cost and effort required to share information, a growing trend of consumers who advise and take lead from each other, and a growing body of knowledge that enables consumers to make more satisfying decisions, creates a self reinforcing feedback loop. The power of this feedback loop erodes the effectiveness of traditional marketing, and disintermediates traditional marketers from being the centre of gravity of consumer influence. (This phenomena has mystified most traditional marketers who have discovered their campaigns just aren’t as effective as they used to be).

A New Mindset For A New Model Agency

If you’re a marketer or executive who’s success and way of thinking is based upon influence techniques that worked in 1996, who frowns upon Facebook, who doesn’t know what a sequential auto-responder is or how to see the number of searches in Google that take place in Ireland on any given month for a specific phrase, you need to update your skill set and mindset or sooner or later, your campaigns will appear as out of date as a mobile phone from 1996. If you only have a bluffers knowledge of social media and interactive marketing tools, don’t be surprised if the market finds your attempts to influence them to be unattractive.

Fortunately, there is an upside and a massive opportunity. Progressive businesses and marketing agencies can use the same tools consumers consult, to gather decision data that enables them to do business better, and then social media tools, to make this visible.

For example, if you read all the reviews on Amazon of products sold in your niche, you can glean insights that can help you make better products in the future, and see the language consumers are using to describe their preferences. The insights gained, together with other online research, can be used to inspire 20 different headlines or slogans for future products, that you can then scientifically test via AdWords, with negligible effort and expense, to determine which one gets the best response. You can feed this back into your social media campaigns and how you describe what you offer, and then use statistical like Google Analytics tools to micro-calibrate the effectiveness of every aspect of your campaign. By learning how to interact with individuals and groups, assisted by modern marketing tools, you can perpetuate a great conversation with your market place that builds trust on consumers terms.

Neil Strauss transformed himself through immersion, learning and dedicated practice. You can transform yourself by searching for answers online, and learning from those who get the best results in 2010. You’re encouraged to be sceptical, and consult the wisdom of your peers by reading discussion forums and blogs and reviews and watching instructional videos galore. You’ll learn as much by participating as you will from inputting information. To be really effective, you need to make smart, data-driven decisions to do business better, and use modern tools to semi-automate your interactions and measure your results and track what your competitors are doing so you can constantly calibrate what is working. Just like Neil Strauss, if you succeed in this challenge, you too can experience satisfying relationships with your customers and make millions online.

(as published in The Digital Times)

This psychological phenomena I experienced is popularly referred to as illusory superiority and more scientifically as the Dunning-Kruger effect. In 2000, Dunning and Kruger won a nobel prize for a research paper titled “Unskilled And Unaware Of it – How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead To Inflated Self-Assessments”. They proved that the majority of people who were incompetent in a range of tasks could not accurately appraise their own lack of ability and most incorrectly thought they were above average compared with everyone else. They showed that, only when a previously poor performer became competent, could they look back and recognise their earlier lack of ability.

A team of researchers from Dartmouth University led by Dr Sydney Finkelstein conducted the largest ever research project governing business failure. They found that smart executives of failed companies consistently demonstrated traits of choosing not to cope with innovation and change, whereby they clung to an inaccurate view of reality, relied too much on what worked in the past, ignored key information and consequently, their companies failed because they brilliantly fulfilled the wrong vision.

Many executives find coping with innovation and change to be a major challenge because the unfamiliar is innately uncomfortable until it becomes familiar. Viriginir Satir, the World famous family therapist, said that after survival, the strongest human instinct is familiarity.

Advances in network and computing technology are rapidly transforming the way people communicate, interact, learn and make decisions. A cursory glance at social media stats will demonstrate such explosive growth. This rate of change creates a challenge for executives who’s view of reality will go out of date unless they consciously and purposefully engage in future reconnaissance; explorations and activities that, as a side effect, update their way of thinking. However, for many executives, the importance of purposefully updating their mindsets may be invisible due to the Dunning-Kruger effect; whereby they falsely assume they are competent because they don’t yet know enough to recognise they are not.

For example, YouTube has evolved to become the 2nd largest online search engine, streaming over a billion videos per day Worldwide, and every minute over 24 hours of video is uploaded. Earlier this year, I spoke to a senior technology innovation advisor to the Irish government who told me they had never even used YouTube. I wonder if the said advisor is able to fully appreciate and conceptualise the demand for faster internet connections if they haven’t had the experience of waiting too long for a video clip to play or personally experienced the value that video-on-demand facilitates for learning, like watching TED.com

Young people tend to be much more naturally engaged in future reconnaissance, and are often quicker to explore and play with new ways of doing things. I’d love to see the government have a panel of 20-year olds advising them on innovation strategy, but many leaders and TD’s don’t know they need such advice, because they don’t understand what they don’t know.

“In an evolving society, if you stand still, you go backwards” – Robert Anton Wilson

So, if you’re a marketing executive who is more likely to read a newspaper offline than online, who has no idea what an RSS feed or a Google Alert is, then perhaps you need to engage in the art of future reconnaissance and consciously and purposefully update your mindset, by exploring the environments of the future, relative to the way you think about the World now.

Here is one way to achieve this: Find the smartest, tech savvy, 20 year old you have access to and hire them as your future reconnaissance mentor. You could, for example, offer to buy them an iPad in exchange for spending a certain number of hours with you to help you recognise how out of date you seem relative to them, thus overcoming any illusory superiority that was demoting the importance of playing with technology. Tell them their brief is to take you on an in-depth tour of their World of technology and communication; how they use social media, YouTube, how they use their mobile phone and how they and their friends consume and share information. Compare notes on how you do things and how they overcome anything you find frustrating. Pay particular attention to any ways their use of tools allows them to be much more productive than you.

By engaging in your own future reconnaissance, you can recalibrate your mind to what is more likely to work in 2010, and in turn, overcome the traits of smart executives who failed. If you make it a habit to consciously and purposefully keep up to date by exploring how technology is changing the underpinnings of society, you’ll be able to make better decisions about interactive marketing strategies and better apply your existing wisdom to evolving mediums. By upgrading the software in your brain, you upgrade your likelihood of success in changing and challenging times.

(as published in The Digital Times)