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SXSW 2015: Wild Efficiency - The Natural Architecture of Social Media
- 1. Wild EfficiencyThe Natural Architecture of Social Media
- 2. We are nothing if not the STORIES WE TELL
- 3. Allen Ginsberg Whoever controls the media... controls the culture“ “ Edited Photo by Nigel’s Europe & Beyond (Flickr:Creative Commons)
- 4. Edited Image by Kristian Bjornard (Wiki Commons) Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own “ “ Carol Burnett
- 5. Van Morrison Television became the new religion a long time back & the media has taken over. “ “ ©2014 Copyright.Patrick Mulford.All Rights Reserved.
- 7. Social Networks are LIVING ORGANISMS Edited Photo byThomas Hawk (Flickr:Creative Commons)
- 11. All living organisms are defined by distinct characteristics7
- 12. Life adapts to its environment: SOCIAL NETWORKS ALSO RESPOND ORGANICALLY & CHAOTICALLY.1
- 13. Edited Image: Robert Plutchik (Wiki Commons) Life reacts to external stimuli: THE SOCIAL ORGANISM REACTS TO EMOTIONAL STIMULI.2
- 14. ALL DECISIONS HAVE AN EMOTIONAL COMPONENT Royalty Free Image:Shutterstock.com
- 15. HUMAN NEEDSARE PRIMAL NEEDS
- 16. Life must be nourished: SOCIAL ORGANISMS FEED ON HUMAN EXPRESSION.3
- 17. SOME OF US BRAG Photo byTrey Ratcliff/Stuck in Customs (Creative Commons)
- 18. OTHERS SEEK Image:Public Domain CC0 1.0 Universal (Pixabay) SYMPATHY
- 19. WE MAKE PUBLICAFFIRMATIONS ©2014 Copyright.Patrick Mulford.All Rights Reserved.
- 20. & CURATE OUR SELF I’m desirable I’m...$#@*!! I’m famous I’m funny I’m attractiveI’m adventurous I’m cool (ie)
- 21. Life has different levels of organization: SOCIAL NODES BUILD A STRUCTURE THROUGH AFFILIATION.4
- 22. Photo by Konstantin Malanchev (Creative Commons - Wiki)
- 23. ©2014 Copyright. Patrick Mulford. All Rights Reserved.
- 24. BEDROOM WALL The
- 25. BEDROOM WALL Influencers Friends Family Places Art & Entertainment Brands Affinity Groups Social media is the new
- 26. This is my aspirational AESTHETIC Here’s how I wish to be seen PROFESSIONALLY This is the NEW MUSIC I value This is my IDEALIZED LIFE METhis is
- 27. Life regulates its internal environment: THE SOCIAL ORGANISM RUTHLESSLY RIDS ITSELF OF POLLUTION.5 Royalty Free Image: Shutterstock.com
- 28. WE ONLY SHARE MUTUALVALUES & PASSIONS
- 29. When someone likes or shares the content you post, it reinforces your sense of belonging within your social network. REASSURANCE ©2011 Copyright.Hiroshi Ishii,MIT Media Lab
- 31. 43 Million Followers on Generic About Page Apple have never posted ANYTHING! We assign value from a position of neutrality, and without incentive. 6.7 Million Followers 508 likes per post 52 Million Followers 1.9 million likes
- 32. 50,277,00042,348,000 39,332,00040,802,000 51,961,00094,110,000 38,073,000 46,045,000 THE MOST‘LIKED’ BRANDS SELL FEELINGS
- 33. Life replicates itself: THE SOCIAL ORGANISM REPLICATES THROUGH MEMES.6
- 34. Telling a joke to your mates is an ACTOFBRAVERY ©1957 Copyright.12Angry Men,MGM Studios.
- 35. MEMES LIMIT THE RISK
- 36. Life spreads: THE SOCIAL ORGANISM IS GAINING STRENGTH & UBIQUITY.7 Royalty Free Image: Shutterstock.com
- 37. Social media has the power to ELEVATE HUMANITY Because the value that connects more people than any other is GOODNESS Royalty Free Image: Shutterstock.com ‘‘ ‘‘
- 38. TAKEAWAYS 01 Social Media is a living organism, that abides by natural laws more than it does mechanical ones.
- 39. TAKEAWAYS 02 People only use social for four reasons… i) Communication ii) To share life moments iii) To affiliate themselves with things that have meaning iv) To share mutual values and passions.
- 40. TAKEAWAYS 03 Social is good for more than arguments about the color of a bloody dress! It allows us to evaluate what’s important in the world.
Editor's Notes
- Hi Guys… My name is Patrick Mulford and I’m the Executive Creative Director at theAudience. For those of you that haven’t heard of us, we’re one of the world’s largest publishers of social content, and there’s around 150 of us working from Los Angeles, London and New York. We publish around 6,000 individual items of social content every month for some of the world’s best loved brands and celebrities, and reach around a billion consumers with about 10-15 billion impressions. That rarified position within the very fabric of the social graph has given us a unique insight into the behavior of people online, and I’d like to share some of our discoveries with you today...
- If you were to ask me what I do for a living I would tell you that I tell stories. And the platform I use to tell these stories just so happens to be social media. Of course there’s nothing new about storytelling. People have been telling tales since the day we learnt to open our mouths and point at things. Stories have always been the primary vehicle by which we pass on vital ideas & truths from one person to the next. Stories... 1. Make ideas sound compelling - and so capture the attention of the listener. 2. They make more complex concepts palatable, and easier to comprehend. 3. And they also make the idea memorable, making it easier to pass on from one person to the next. Whether we’re talking about religious principles, moral codes of conduct, or more trivial ideas such as town gossip or advertising - civilization has always laid it’s foundations on the stories we tell each other. A post on someone’s social feed, however small, is a story. Ernest Hemingway was once challenged by his colleagues to write a story in six words. They bet him $10 a piece that he couldn’t do it. Hemingway came up with this... For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. He won the bet. Hemingway’s story was 33 characters. A 140 character tweet seems pretty indulgent by comparison. And a picture, as we know, paints a thousand words - that was a proverb; another example of very short stories used to pass vital concepts from person to another in a memorable form! But every story is only as gripping as the way you tell it - the way that evokes the maximum emotional response from any given audience.
- Of course it’s no good telling a story if no-one is listening. So that’s why historically, whoever controlled the distribution channel tended to control the message, and ultimately the culture. For thousands of years that distribution channel was oral tribe culture, word of mouth, which was then largely replaced across Western Europe by organized religion. This is Christchurch Priory, the largest parish church in England. It has dominated the skyline of my home town of Christchurch since 1094, and was built upon the foundations of an even older Saxon church. For much of that time it also dictated the culture by way of a collection of very compelling cautionary tales known as the Bible. The Bible was the most widely distributed manuscript, and as most of the townsfolk were illiterate and couldn’t understand much Latin, the dominant storytellers of the day were the clergy. Even gossip, a remnant of oral tribe culture, was kept in check by providing townsfolk with somewhere to shelter from the rain. This huge North Porch is far larger than it ever needed to be, and it has a stone bench that runs all the way around the interior wall. It was probably the largest sheltered communal space in town, and the clergy could listen in on the conversation. Gossiping townsfolk, known as ‘scolds’ were tied to the ducking stool and dunked unceremoniously in the mill stream.
- The church’s stranglehold on storytelling was broken in the mid-fifteenth century, when Johannes Gutenburg invented the Gutenburg Press. Ironically the first book he printed was a Bible, but soon printing presses were making it far easier for scientists, scholars, artists, writers and doctors to rapidly distribute ideas throughout the world. Within 50 years printing presses are thought to have produced between 150-200 million documents, and the era of mass communication had begun - an era that permanently altered the structure of society.
- Over the next 500 years mass communication developed to encompass a broad range of media channels, from newspapers and radio, to film and television. The internet evolved into one such channel during the 1990’s - primarily as a source of information. But at its heart the concept behind mass media has always remained the same - it’s a single source transmitting information to the largest possible group of receivers.
- And a lot of what this single source transmitted was information about products and services - advertising - information that the source wanted to tell their captive audience.
- And then social media arrived on the scene. Social networks are very different from other forms of mass communication - they are a mass media channel created by, and consisting of, people. Essentially - social media is the democratization of the internet! All of those nodes in the network have a frictionless form of distribution at their disposal, that filters posts for relevancy and value in realtime.
- This is a volvox. It’s an algae. It’s one of the very first forms of multi-cellular life to evolve on this planet. It emerged from the primordial soup in around 1.2 Billion BC. It’s pretty isn’t it?
- This is a mold colony. It spreads outwards in a random and organic way through these hair-like branches known as hyphae.
- And this is a computer generated model of a social network. It’s nothing more than a colony of living organisms. People interacting with one another. You’ll notice the bright spots which are the influencers and brands that have the broadest reach. The network grows organically, as more people join and their connections get stronger and more complex.
- And if it’s true that a social network IS a living organism then it must conform to the same characteristics that define ALL living things. If you look in any given biology textbook it will tell you that there are in fact seven defining characteristics of a living organism. Every textbook lists them as seven different things (which I find very strange) but there are always seven of them (which I find even stranger!). As an experiment I’ve taken the seven most commonly quoted characteristics and drawn a comparison between them and the behavior of a social network.
- For instance all life adapts to its environment, and social networks are just the same. They develop through frictionless sharing in a responsive and unpredictable manner. No single person is in control of this network - and the conversation is shaped chaotically by the collective masses. That, for me, is what makes social media so fascinating. You can’t control it like you can traditional media. Replicating traditional distribution is extremely difficult, and repeating the same results twice is all but impossible. It requires a totally different mindset. You’re at the mercy of all those nodes in the network, and their specific personal and emotional requirements.
- Because in the same way that life reacts to external stimuli, the social organism responds to human emotions. These emotions aren’t as simple as feeling ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ - they’re a lot more complex than you may give them credit for. They are a subtle cocktail of primal triggers that evolved in order to ensure your survival. This strange looking star is the Plutchik Emotion Circumplex. Robert Plutchik was leading psychologists who believed that primary emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise, evolved in order to increase the reproductive fitness in animals. For instance... 1. When you feel scared - you’re more likely to run away from a rattlesnake. 2. When you feel love - you’re more likely to protect their partner and children. 3. When you feel angry - you’re more likely to act aggressively towards a rival. He believed that there were 8 primary bipolar emotions that could be expressed in different intensities, and, like colors, you can mix them to make different, even more subtle emotions. This means that there are all sorts of emotions rolling around in your head, that are sometimes difficult to define, and that you don’t always have much control over. These emotional triggers activate instinctive reactions in your amygdala; the primal (reptilian) part of your brain. This is the part of the brain that makes you bite your lip when you watch a sad movie.
- This is the amygdala - right here. It’s about the size of a peanut, but it’s really important - not just from an emotional perspective, but also when it comes to making choices. There are numerous stories of people who have suffered amygdala damage or lost the use of it entirely, and they have subsequently found it impossible to make decisions. One man was placed in a room and told to choose either a red or a blue pencil. As he couldn’t place an emotional value on either pencil - it was impossible for him to choose. All decisions have an emotional component - in fact some scientists argue that the choices we make are completely at the mercy of our emotions. This makes life tricky for us when the emotions we feel are so complex, especially if you are trying to persuade a consumer to make a choice.
- The reason your emotions are essentially primal is because the amygdala, like the rest of the human body, evolves really slowly. 20,000 years ago we were all lactose intolerant. We lost the enzyme that broke down milk once we’d weaned as babies. But as we started rearing domestic goats and cows some people’s genes mutated and they kept those enzymes for life. Today over 90% of Americans (and almost as many Europeans) are ‘lactose persistent’. We’re evolving in order adapt to our changing environment. Unfortunately our environment is changing much faster than we can ever evolve, and the human body working this laptop is essentially still that of a caveman. Despite our ability to learn, and adapt to our environment intellectually, our subconscious instincts are emotionally driven.
- Life must also be nourished. It consumes stuff. And social networks feed on content. Much of this content chronicles the rolling narrative of your life. Social has become the ‘de facto’ vehicle by which we share life moments with our friends and family.But everyone curates their life moments - and they curate them for a reason. The nature and motivation behind any two feeds is never quite the same...
- The great thing about platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is that they allow you to present your life in whatever light you’d like it to be seen in. They allow us to filter our experiences in a way that cuts out all of the boring, mundane bits, and present a far more interesting personality to the world - raising our friends’ perception of us. Everyone has a friend who’s life is curated in a way that looks infinitely more exciting than own own. In my case social media has allowed me to present a far more fascinating individual to the world than the awkward, socially inept teenager I was at school, and vindicate many of the extremely questionable life choices that I’ve made in the subsequent years.
- Other people tend to offload. One person I know, who shall remain nameless, has a tendency to post comments such as - ‘I hate cars and freeways‘ and ‘I can’t believe that just happened to me again!’. What happened? What am I supposed to do with this information? Am I supposed to ‘like‘ it? I certainly can’t share it? No, he’s hoping that someone asks him what’s wrong. He’s seeking sympathy from his friends, and solidarity in his predicament - a little bit of empathy and support when it feels as if he’s struggling on his own. None of us really need to know how his life really sucks at a granular level... but for him it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy!
- This is a plate I spotted on the back of a shiny new Range Rover in Hollywood. I couldn’t quite work out whether the owner was publicly thanking her partner for a rather lavish gift, or whether (from the paw prints) she was referring to her dog!You’ll have noticed that your friends have a tendency to openly declare their undying love on Facebook too, and send a shout out to their best friends the morning after a particularly memorable bonding session. Others will declare their love for their amazing child - even if they’re too young to read!Is there any reason why they couldn’t just speak to their loved ones face to face - or send them a private message? Not at all. This is something different. This is about publicly attesting to the strength and importance of a relationship.
- There is no better vehicle to project our ‘aspirational selves’ than through our social identities - as we can filter what we choose people to see. Detachment provides us with the time and diligence we need to leave the desired impression - a luxury not afforded to us real life. Most selfies are carefully curated to express a particular attribute of your personality, whether that be humor, style, sexiness or adventurousness.There’s a great story currently circling about Danny Bowman, the British teenager who became so obsessed with capturing the perfect selfie that he spent 10 hours a day taking up to 200 photos. The 19-year-old lost nearly 30 pounds, dropped out of school and did not leave the house for six months in his quest to get the right picture. He would take 10 pictures immediately after waking up. Frustrated with his attempts to take the one image he wanted, Bowman eventually tried to take his own life by overdosing, but was saved by his mom. He’s currently a popular talk show celebrity - so in a strange kinda way he ended up gaining the popular acceptance he wanted in the first place.
- The same way that life arranges itself into different levels of organization (from internal organs all the way through to complex, multi-organism colonies), social graphs construct a hierarchy based upon how valuable each node is to the rest of the network. People use social networks is to define their world, and their relationship to it - by affiliating themselves with the things that have value in their lives. You see everyone wants to believe that they are different from everyone else. And what makes them different is their personality, their experiences, the people they love, the things they believe in, and the things that they feel passionate about. Social networks provide us with a platform to express our individuality. Again, this is by no means a new concept...
- Ever since we learnt to smear charcoal on the wall of a cave we’ve used physical expression as a way to make sense of our reality. Primitive art tended to focus on the three key subjects... 1. Tribal life, hunting, and the structure of their societies. 2. Creation mythology - where do we come from, and what’s it all about? 3. And an obsession with the female form and fertility. So nothing much has changed there then!
- We also used it to define position within that reality - and our importance within a social group.This is an Iban headhunter that I photographed in a longhouse in Sarawak, Southwest Borneo. According to anthropological studies, every one of his faded tattoos is supposed to signify a defining moment in his life, his rank within the community, and his outstanding achievements, such as when he cuts off a rival’s head. What I found most fascinating about the encounter was that when my interpreter asked him what his tattoos meant he was able to explain some of them, but then admitted that he got most of them because his friends had them and he thought they looked cool. Ancient tribal societies were at the mercy of the same peer pressures that we see today.
- Defining ourselves is especially important when we’re young, because we’re claiming that identity for the first time - independent from our parents. Remember when you were a teenager and you hung posters on your bedroom wall? The bands you loved, photos of your friends, the places you visited, the cars, the fashions, and the films you admired? That patchwork of cultural values helped to define your emerging identity.
- Well social media is the new bedroom wall. It’s the place where you affiliate yourself with... 1. Your friends 2. Your family 3. Influencers - such as celebrities, Instagram stars and YouTube sensations. 4. Brands - that share the same values as you (we’ll get to that again a bit later) 5. Arts & Entertainment Properties - such as films and music artists. 6. Affinity Groups - such as schools, political or religious entities, charities or sports clubs. 7. ...and places - either ones you’ve visited or ones you dream of visiting. These elements build an emotional mosaic of our lives - the people that are important to us, and the things we identify with.
- And whilst Facebook is currently the most popular Western platform for creating your generic profile, other platforms are optimized to allow you to express different facets of your personality. For instance... LinkedIn - allows us to express our professional selves. Pinterest - our aspirational aesthetic. Instragram - is more about projecting an idealized view of life, whilst niche platforms such as SoundCloud allow us to explore specific interests, such as new music. People are always asking me ‘What’s the next big thing?’ or ‘What’s going to be the next Facebook?’. Well obviously if I knew that I wouldn’t be here - I’d be sitting in San Tropez on the deck of my mega-yacht, counting my billions into neat little piles. But maybe the best place to start searching is in the places where people have an emotional need, or an area of self-expression, that is not currently being serviced by social platforms. This is where emerging platforms such as Whisper and Secret are so interesting as they don’t necessarily have a practical use. Instead they are satisfying irrational human behavior.
- Living things regulate their internal environment. Which is a polite way of saying that they poop! The social organism is the same. It ruthlessly rids itself of content it deems as pollution or superfluous to requirements.
- We only create and share content that resonates with us. content that expresses the values and passions that connect us to our friends. And we do this by posting content that we believe will resonate with our network, and responding whenever our friends do the same to us. You see posting content is never a selfless act. When someone posts something to their feed they’re expecting a reaction; an emotional response that manifests itself as a ‘like’, a ‘share’, as a comment - from one person at the very least. Because we are looking for reassurance that the cultural choices we are making are valid.
- This here is the ‘Like-A-Hug Jacket, which was created in 2011 by MIT Media Lab. It’s a physical jacket that’s connected by Bluetooth to your phone, and whenever someone likes a piece of your content on Facebook it has bellows inside that physically inflate to give you a hug. And hugs are very important to the human psyche. According to American psychotherapist Virginia Satir everyone needs 8 hugs a day in order to maintain emotional wellbeing, and when you’re a child you need even more hugs, you need 16 in order to emotionally grow. And this is why children tend to elicit more cuddles than adults do. When someone reacts to one of your posts it’s like a virtual hug. When someone likes or shares a piece of your content, it reinforces your sense of belonging within that social network.
- Of course in order to make that connection you first need that ‘emotional currency’, that piece of content that’s going to allow you to connect to your friends. And we’re all constantly searching for pieces of content we think our friends will like. We’ll search on the internet, we’ll create that content ourselves, but more often than not we’ll share something that someone has shared with us. This might be content that’s been created by our friends, maybe by influencers, but it will also come from brands. That’s why the more universal the value or emotion your brand post elicits, the greater the chance it has the ability to connect you with your friends. The more compelling the content the greater the propensity they’ll be for your friends to share it. This is a screen shot from the Dove Beauty Sketch video - the most viewed piece of branded content in the history of the internet. We helped Dove reach 188 million people with a movie that has nothing to do with a cosmetic product, and everything to do with a deeply psychological view of self-image that resonates with almost every woman. This shared values makes women gravitate towards a brand that they feel they have a far more meaningful connection with.
- And social is a level playing field - people create these affiliations from a position of neutrality. Microsoft, a very big company that arguably has limited emotional connectivity, has around 6.7 million fans ‘affiliated’ to its brand page on Facebook. The company provides a pretty steady stream of content - around two posts a day, albeit with very low interaction rates (the average is around 508 likes per post - and they’re lucky if they get 1,000 likes on a post). Meanwhile Apple, the world’s most valuable brand, has over 43 million followers on an automatically generated Facebook page. They’ve never posted a thing - never. In fact they don’t even have an official Facebook Page. The affinity that people feel towards the brand is enough to make them like it, without any prospect of reward. Apple would certainly be one of the world’s most liked brands if they ever bothered with their social platforms. Then there are celebrities. Take Usher for instance. He has almost 60 million fans on Facebook alone. A single image of Usher and his son (everyone knows that babies, puppies and kittens are solid gold in social!) can get up to 1.9 million likes. His values mean so much more to people than those of almost any brand.
- And this is because if you want to make friends in social you have to stand for more than just a product. Brands such as Oreos, Converse and Red Bull are more of a state of mind, they’re a memory, an emotion, and a way of seeing the world that resonates with tens of millions of people. The values embodied by Coke and Disney are so universal that they command fanbases in Facebook larger than any other consumer brand. In fact if you add up the fans across Disney’s entire portfolio they have over a billion ‘likes’. You have to bear in mind that many fans will have liked multiple properties, but it still demonstrates how powerful it is when you stand for something that EMOTIONALLY connects you and your fans.
- Life replicates itself - and so does content, in the form of memes. Broadly accepted creative platforms play an important part in the helping people express themselves in social.
- Because, just like telling a joke, sharing content is an act of bravery. How many people here would own up to having posted something that they thought was cool to their page and then when no-one commented they took it down? Did you know that people in Dubai really don’t like ‘The Flintstones’? But apparently the people in ‘Abu Dhabi Doooooooooooooooo!’ Ahh... phew you laughed. I heard that joke and I thought you’d like it. Hey you might even share it with your friends. The fact that you laughed reflects favorably on me, makes you think I’m a marginally funnier guy than you did before. Of course if you hadn’t laughed I would have looked like an ass - and my standing within this little social group would have lowered.
- That’s why memes and commonly circulated hashtags are so useful. Memes are creative platforms that have already been embraced by your peers, and so that limits the risk of ridicule when you pair them with a sentiment. If you know your friends are aligned with the values of the same brand as you, its content can be a similarly low-risk share.
- And the final characteristic of life is that, when the conditions are right, it spreads. It grows. It expands. And few people would argue that social media isn’t doing the same. That’s because people have found an emotional outlet to express themselves and their relationship to the world that was otherwise very difficult in modern culture.
- In fact I believe that social media is the greatest social experiment in the history of mankind. It’s an experiment that’s going on this very moment - an experiment that will result in a profound shift in the way people see themselves, and their place in the world. This in turn will have a huge impact upon our relationship with brands, and the way that companies engage with their audience. If you look at this year’s Superbowl ads you can see the impact social storytelling is having on the rest of popular culture. - Nine ads featured dog and cats (mostly puppies and kittens). - Another nine featuring baby elephants, goats, bunnies, horses, and all sorts of other animals. - 18 featuring kids, and just as many that used the ‘value’ of fatherhood to engage with football fans. It’s no longer a brand-centric world, and companies are being forced to engage on the consumer’s terms - terms that are totally and unequivocally selfish and emotional in nature.
- Thanks everyone - I hope you found some of these ideas useful or interesting.