This month’s Harvard Business review cover story, Strategy for Turbulent Times, explains how the pace of competitive change has reached an “inflection point.” Up until now the business world has been obsessed with the notion of building a sustainable competitive advantage — it is the idea at the core of strategy textbooks, of Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, and the successes many 20th century companies. But we are now living in a time where competitive advantage often evaporates in less than a year. As the article proclaims: “Sustainable competitive advantage is now the exception, not the rule. Transient advantage is the new normal.”
I was thinking about this article last Thursday when Instagram released a new update that now supports 15-second video sharing, a direct assault on Vine, Twitter’s app which came out just six months ago, and defined six-second video as a new content format. By Sunday there was already blood in the water.
Vine had dropped from No.2 to No.7 on the U.S. iPhone download chart of free apps in the wake of the new Instagram video update. Sunday was the first day since March 27th that Vine did not place in the top-5 most popular American iPhone apps. In another stronghold, Mexico, Vine dropped from No.3 to No.10 in three days. In its biggest European market, the United Kingdom, Vine dropped from No.5 to No.12. Globally, Vine placed in the top-10 iPhone downloads in 11 countries on Sunday. Down sharply from 34 countries last Thursday, and 29 countries just two weeks ago.
It all sort of begs the question: If Twitter had gone in with the assumption that Instagram would replicate this concept at the first opportunity, how would they have made Vine differently?
Would they have integrated the Vine functionality into the Twitter mobile experience directly rather than try to establish a new, external platform around a single utility? That, after all, is what Instagram did. Admittedly the jumble of video and photo content in the same feed is a bit foreign right now, but we acclimated to images and video in our Twitter feeds, and we’ll get accustomed to this all too quickly, too.
Twitter released a new product that introduced a novel content format disconnected from the mothership. Instagram said, thanks for doing the market testing for us, we’ll take it from here, and wove Insta-video into what they are as an app now.
It was either Benjamin Franklin or Winston Churchill who remarked in a prior century, “Plan to fail and fail to plan.” In the 21st century, the truism is now more accurately something like “Fail to plan to fail, and fail to plan….AND plan to fail.”
What would you do differently today, if you knew your competitive advantage wouldn’t last tomorrow?
Remember back when I used to be a social media strategist?
I started before that term was even being used, and as late as this October the L.A. Times still hadn’t gotten the memo that I had move on, calling me a “social media expert” for my crimes (among them: 1, 2, 3).
So you’d be forgiven if you hadn’t realized that I’d become a product strategist. (Social media, it’s not you, it’s me. Well, it’s kind of you. But mostly, it’s me. Anyway, at this point everything is social, so let’s call it even.)
While 2012 has been the quietest year on Social-Creature since I started the site, elsewhere it’s been quite prolific. So as the year comes to a close, I thought I’d take a break to share some of what’s been going on.
MIRRORGRAM:
This Fall I led the launch strategy for a new iOS photo app, called Mirrorgram. In its first week, the app, created by Justin Boreta, of the Glitch Mob, and StageBloc, had over 165,000 users (!!!), gotten selected as the top “New & Noteworthy” app on the App Store:
reached #1 paid app in the photo and video category:
and #11 paid app overall:
Less than 2 months in, Mirrorgram now has over 300,000 users, there are nearly 45,000 images in the #mirrorgram feed on Instagram, and mirroring has become a cultural aesthetic trend:
You’re welcome / We’re sorry.
Anyway, watching hundreds of thousands of people use the product has offered visibility into some really fascinating behavioral insights around iPhone creativity, the mechanics of digital art creation, and the white space on the photo sharing landscape. More about what we’ve learned, and how these insights are informing further product strategy, including a truly exciting new direction in the app’s evolution — hint: what’s Instagram NOT for? (porn, aside) — in the new year, so stay tuned!
GATHER:
Gather began as a hip, little boutique, beloved by Racked LA and LA Weekly for carrying all local L.A. designers. Now this idea has evolved into what I, and my partner, Katie Kay Mead, see as the future of hyper-local design discovery and retail.
While shopping has moved online, the discovery of locally-created design is still trapped by brick-and-mortar, and coincidence. The new Gather site, relaunched this Fall, is designed address this gap, allowing visitors to easily discover cutting-edge design just around the corner. As the L.A. Times put it in their recent Sunday feature on Gather:
More to come on the arising cultural behaviors and beliefs that have laid the foundation for Gather’s new direction — including why flash sale leaders are desperate to reposition themselves as purveyors of special (rather than discounted) things, and the emerging local trend, bolstered by campaigns like AmEx’s “Small Business Saturday” and Millennials’ proclivities.
In the meantime:
And there’s other bright news as well, but I’ll tell you when I see you in 2013!
Ever since Apple started putting a lowercase i in front of its products, their advertisements have been known for basically two things — articulating a visceral, transcendent grace inherent within the Mac product experience:
Which is why the iPad ads — with their exaggeratedly simplistic gestures, their induced first-person perspective, (the people in the photos always seem to be seated in some awkward position in order to give us, the viewers, the perspective of being the “user” in the image), and above all, the blatantly basic depiction of the product experience — just don’t quite fit with the image of what an Apple ad is supposed to be.
If these ads seem like a departure, it’s because they are.
In the 60′s, Everett Rogers broke down the process by which trends, products, and ideas proliferate through culture. There are five basic types of adopter personas in his diffusion of innovation theory:
Innovators are the first to adopt an innovation. They are, by defualt, risk-takers since being on the front lines means they are likely to adopt a technology or an idea which may ultimately fail. Early Adopters are the second fastest category to adopt an innovation. They’re more discrete in their adoption choice than Innovators, but have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Individuals in the Early Majority adopt an innovation after having let the Innovators and Early adopters do product-testing for them. The Late Majority approaches an innovation with a high degree of skepticism, and after the majority of society has already adopted the innovation first. And finally, Laggards are the last to get on board with a new innovation. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents, tend to be advanced in age, and to be focused on “traditions.”
“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework.
The key to the Wii’s success is that it made gaming simple, broadly accessible, and inherently intuitive. Later that year, AdAge wrote that the Wii’s popularity is “part of a growing phenomenon that’s overhauling the video-gaming industry…. Video gaming is beginning to transcend the solitary boy-in-the-basement stereotype with a new generation of gamers including women, older people and younger children.”
Anyone who has bought, or even used, an iPhone at some point during the three years since the first iteration was released, already understands what the iPad is all about without any help from an ad. Indeed, Apple has done such a good job of making ads aimed at early adopters for the past decade, they no longer need to. An ad is not going to make a difference in whether someone on the left-hand side of Apple’s adopter bell-curve buys an iPad or not. Instead, these ads are targeted straight at the people on the downhill slope.
While overall social networking use by online American adults has grown from 35% in 2008 to 61% in 2010, the increase is even more dramatic among older adults. The rate of online social networking approximately quadrupled among Older Boomers (9% to 43%) and the GI Generation (4% to 16%).
Of course, Millennials still have a healthy lead among all age groups in social network use, with 83% of online adults from 18-33 engaging in social networking, but grandma and grandpa are just catching up. Particularly grandma. Last year, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was women over 55.
Unlike the Apple ads we’ve become accustomed to in the 2000’s, these iPad ads are no longer touting the product’s “higher resolution experience” to digital natives. That is, they are not emphasizing the ephemeral or smugly superior subtleties that are inaccessible to anyone who does not intuitively “get it.” These ads are, instead, paring the experience down to be as unintimidating as possible. Not only is the iPad a completely new way to experience personal computing, it is as effortless to use this technology, the ads say to you, the viewer, as if you were, yourself, a digital native.
“Is The Tipping Point Toast?” asks the recent FastCompany article in which researcher duncan watts talks about his findings (and their less than exuberant reception) that expose the billion dollars a year marketers spend targeting “influentials” as a waste of money.
i am constantly repeating the phrase that “we buy the brands and products that we feel express aspects of our identity,” and this applies to ideas as well. we buy into and espouse the ideas that express aspects of who we are. our “intuition” in that sense, could be seen not so much a kind of internal tuning fork dinging to the tone of the universe, but rather an insidiously partial filter which evaluates the validity of information based on its compliance with our ingrained personal predispositions. for marketers–an avocation that calls for a particular breed of identity, of course–it’s no doubt easy to latch on to the idea that a select few influential individuals wield the capacity to push trends over the tipping point simply by their involvement in the process. after all, considering what we do it’s pretty “intuitive” for us, isn’t it?
from the fastcompany article:
Marketing has always relied heavily on instinct and intuition. Admen like to believe they’re creative geniuses, gifted at truffling out social trends (which is why, they hasten to point out, they’re irreplaceable). Joe Pilotta, research VP for a firm called Big Research, suspects marketers cling to their belief in Influentials partly because they’re lazy. They love the idea of needing to reach only a small group of people to “tip” a product, he says with a laugh. Plus, it strokes their egos: “Think about it. You’re saying, ‘I am in control–I am the biggest influencer, because I am going to influence the influencers!’ It’s an arrogance that only the corporate world could enjoy.”
which certainly makes ME wonder to what extent what we know–or believe we know–about the nature of how marketing is supposed to work is actually based on the the egos of CMOs as opposed to on actual social theory. how about you?
see, i think all of coolhunting is a ridiculous waste of time. there is no universal “cool” that exists out of context, and while i do believe strongly that marketers themselves are NEVER the demo, i also think that all of us are subject to the context of the cultures or communities of which we are a part. translation: cool matters not because it’s “cool” but because–and only if–it’s culturally relevant. and while relevance sounds a lot less sexy than its mistaken-identity doppelganger, cool, it’s relevance that “trends” are really about.
Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. He programmed a group of 10,000 people, all governed by a few simple interpersonal rules. Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of “infecting” another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The “people” in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability–some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe. In essence, it was a virtual society run–in a very crude fashion–according to the rules laid out by thinkers like Gladwell and Keller.
Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.
The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.
Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
i really like that phrase, so i’ll write it again: A trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded.
we buy the brands, products, ideas, political candidates, etc., etc., we feel express aspects of our identities. a trend’s success depends not on how COOL it is, but on how effectively it manages to express a common-enough identity aspect. in other words, one way to look at the success of the trend that is “The Tipping Point” itself is that it has managed to express an identity aspect shared by a whole lot of marketers. not because it was cool, perhaps not even because it was RIGHT, but simply because it resonated with a particular–and particularly widespread–identity.
perhaps instead of building databases of “trend-spotters,” “brand evangelists,” “influencers” or whatever else those agencies that are so proud of themselves for getting to sit at the “cool kids” table want to call them, a more useful application of money would be to research the dynamics of our ability to BE influenced. and when i say “our” i mean all of us, marketers included. because, after all, being human helps in the process of figuring out how to communicate to other humans.
and maybe i read it wrong, but to me gladwell’s book wasn’t ever really about some people being blessed with the ability to start trends better than others, but rather some people being more curious, and thereby simply ending up in the way of more trends. consider how many more things an “early adopter” tries out that NEVER take off than the average person? they don’t necessarily help more stuff tip, they just try more shit out. what? were you expecting a different model? if so, maybe you should stop saying the word “viral” so much. that might aid a perspective shift:
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”
so… “If influentials cannot tip a trend into existence–and if success in a networked society is quite random–what’s a poor marketer to do?” The article suggests that, “Since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible–and not waste money chasing “important” people.” and while i agree with this, I think the “ultimate irony” proposed at the end of the article is misleading:
“If you really buy [Watts’s research], the most effective way to pitch your idea is … mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete. “
cultural relevance–especially in a networked society–is not entirely as random as watts’s algorithmic computer simulations, and simply broadcasting a message doesn’t make it more relevant, but there is no special group of cultural gate-keepers that get to decide what’s going to be relevant and what’s not.
“I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day–when we put all those pieces together–maybe we’ll have a shot at the truth.”
– Malcom Gladwell
it’s not cute, it’s not hip, it’s not clever, it just makes you sound antiquated. this is not the 90’s and there IS no more viral. it’s over. deal with it.
“and then we’ll just use a viral blahblahblahblahblah”
i’m sorry, what did you say?
“yes, i said, ‘and then we’ll just use that thing that’s gonna make all our stock go up.'”
uhhmm….
“i said, ‘and then we’ll just use the magic love potion that’ll make people fall in love.'”
wait… what?
“i said, ‘and then we’ll just use that thing that’s gonna do something we have no way of controlling, but i’m gonna say it like we can anyway.”
it sounds like nails dragging across some absurd chalkboard.
all there is is content, expression, and tools. there’s compelling, relevant content, content which says something about me, whether it’s my sense of humor, or my political leanings, or my musical taste, whatever. content that’s gonna express something about who i am to the people i share it with, and that i think they too will appreciate. and there are the tools to facilitate that sharing, (use your imagination…please).
that’s it.
there is no “viral” thing in that equation ANYWHERE. i know it would make your job or worldview or whatever easier if there was, but that’s no excuse. the sun does not revolve around the earth. deal with it.
viral is like the new clothes of the online marketing emperor.
do you even know what you’re saying when you say it?
cuz it doesn’t exist.
it’s actually gotten to the point now where–and i swear, i’m not making this up, but–ANY kind of online content that COULD, potentially, be shared, that is simply share-able is now being referred to as “viral.”
“we’ll just use a viral email,” “a viral widget,” “viral banner”–the entire internet is evidently just a giant contaminated pitri dish of “viral content.” the word is so absurdly misused that it’s completely lost any meaning whatsoever. its utterance isn’t even an incorrect usage anymore, it’s simply just gobbledygook nonsense.
like market forces and falling in love “viral” is a phenomenon. using the word like you think it refers to a type of content (i.e. “viral video”), or a marketing strategy (i.e. “making it go viral”) doesn’t give you cred. to anyone that’s actually willing to confront the inevitable complexity of what’s entailed in designing and encouraging what is essentially just effective word of mouth, saying “viral” just makes you sound out of touch and ridiculous!
