“Information Wants To Be Free” - The Razorfish FEED report
17th November 09
Last week saw the publication of FEED 2009 and an accompanying Ad Age article by its primary author, Garrick Schmitt.
The third year of this annual, US-based report, the 2009 edition makes a bit of a departure, with the emphasis squarely on brands and the degree to which digital brand experiences shape & drive purchase. It’s received a mix of high praise and some criticism. We’ve found the report itself and the reactions to it thought-provoking stuff, so caught up with Garrick who kindly agreed to mull over a few questions with us. Here’s a run-through of what particularly caught our attention.
1. The numbers, which taken at face value suggest:
i. The growing role of digital brand experiences in driving purchase decisions amongst connected consumers (”digital brand experiences create customers”).
ii. How digital is collapsing & accelerating the path to purchase, not just making it easier to track. As FEED puts it: “social networks become the outlet malls of the future.”
iii. A migration towards more sophisticated levels of participation & interaction (”digital fluency“) in digital media.
2. As we see it, when put alongside other research examining macro trends in online behaviour (from the likes of Forrester, for example), some interesting challenges to conventional wisdom are thrown up:
i. Jakob Nielsen’s 90:9:1 rule (the concept of ‘participation inequality’) starts to look outmoded. Nielsen has always maintained it’s a moveable feast dependent upon a number of variables, but perhaps the starting point now needs to indicate a much more even distribution of participation.
ii. If *active* online experiences of a brand are key drivers of purchase, this supports brands exploring platforms & programs, leaving display advertising to be deployed as smart sign-posting and/or simple promotional tactics, or, conversely, made as rich and interactive as possible - providing mini brand experiences, if you will.
iii. If the interactions people seek with brands online relate to ‘deals/offers’ and ’service’ to a significant degree, it follows that:
- the silo walls between marketing & customer service teams in particular need breaking down; they are increasingly one and the same thing, or need to work together as a genuine network or eco-system.
- most provocatively, this challenges a one-dimensional interpretation of what commercial ‘creativity’ means online. Whilst we’d be the first to leap on the figure of c.20% of respondents looking for “entertaining or interesting” interactions with brands, nonetheless we still need to broaden our definition of creativity when the rest are looking for something else entirely. We can’t put this better than a statement Ben Kunz recently made about the nature of creativity in a social media age on Edward Boches’ blog:
“The ability to recast a cold hard brand into a warm human face is a miraculous change, yet it takes immense creativity to pull it off. By creativity, I don’t mean a brand position or message or high concept, but a creative use of a real team of humans to get on Twitter and other channels and present themselves as the real heart of a brand. It’s creativity with a shitload of effort. It’s risk and human souls. Perhaps that’s the most creative endeavor of all.”
Equally, witness the rise and rise of platforms and programs versus short term message-based campaigns. As Garrick puts it, “the experience *is* the message.”
3. The radical openness with which the data set has been shared. What would be locked away as proprietary information in many organizations was published front and centre in a freely available pdf and slideshare. Garrick cites transparency first and second, a desire “simply to share…if our work could help shape the conversation and direction that our industry takes it would be good to contribute.” We would add: this manages to be at once a generous and a calculated, smart move: giving valuable information away in this way serves to accelerate its distribution and is reputation-enhancing for the provider. Sending out hard copies to a few influential industry types clearly didn’t do any harm either.
4. The debate about coverage bias & how the data has been reported. Some heated points of view here. We’d agree headlines around the online behaviour & size of the sample could have been brought in earlier in the report, so the reader could ‘weight’ the findings in their own mind from the start. Nonetheless, we buy the principle that a ‘connected consumer’ is key to many client businesses, historically an indicator of things to come & only swelling in size / representational value. We also hadn’t assumed purchase decisions would be so heavily influenced by experiences of a brand online, just because the sample are relatively heavy users of the internet - they do have lives offline too…
5. Finally, the care with which the report, its accompanying blog and illustrations were designed (the latter by David Fullarton) and produced, not to mention the story around it. Easy to dismiss as style over content, but how many reports have we all read which ignore the importance of UX, visual impact, wit & brevity in an ADD-raddled world?
Download the pdf and/or slideshare here
18 comments on ““Information Wants To Be Free” - The Razorfish FEED report”
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Mel Exon
It is a good report. My post on its bias, and the lack of transparency around it, simply questioned — why? If trend lines are moving toward social media (which they are), why not be clear in such a report that this is only a subset of the population, the early adopters/connected users.
By not being clear until page 14, the stats become unclear hyperbole — good for RFish business development perhaps but not so good for clients. If I had thrown these stats around in a meeting with a client, I’d be laughed off the floor.
RFish has good points and a good practice. It is also just a tiny slice of the total media universe. The average U.S. consumer watches more than 5 hours of live TV a day. I’m all for evaluating new channels, but we really need to put such data in context. Extrapolating from 1,000 early adopters to assume everyone will only watch YouTube is like asking kids at Halloween what their favorite food is. You get an accurate answer, but the sweets are perhaps tainted truth.
Nice take, though.
Haven’t read whole report but all of these points and conclusions are valid. The real question isn’t whether and how brands learn to do these things online and in the social space, it’s more a matter of how they learn to inspire, encourage and validate others doing it for them. The switch from telling stories to getting others to tell them even co-create them. Ben is right also that this is still a small segment of the total population participating. But it is coming fast. From my own new experiment with http://thenextgreatgeneration.com it’s obvious that there’s a generation coming who connects this way, shares content this way and expects brands to do the same. From listening and observing these future influencers, even if only anecdotal and not an accurate sample, all of the predictions that our industry acknowledges, but shrugs off will come true. Free content will be expected and, in fact, part of a brand’s contract with a consumer. See what inbound marketing firms like Hubspot are doing. Co-creation will be standard, not because you want better ideas but because you want participation from the audience. And finally, as consumers look to each other more than to the brands themselves, it will change further the balance of influence. Right now the challenge is scale and speed. But the larger the communities become and the better we get at inspiring them, the sooner that challenge will disappear as well.
“Co-creation will be standard, not because you want better ideas but because you want participation from the audience” is a perfect summary of a key driver behind changes in behaviour. Brands actively encouraging - in fact incentivising - more sophisticated degrees of audience participation online… In fact, is anyone working on a brief that doesn’t ask for this? Just a thought.
The shift underway is not nearly as clearly defined as one would think. A few themes that need calibration. The overarching rule is: SOMETIMES.
1) All content will be free. SOMETIMES. Kids glady pay to send - and in the States receive (!) - text messages. There is no forcing function that will alter that.
2) Co-creation as a mega-trend is of course non-sense. For starters it doesn’t scale. In general … SOMETIMES.
3) The 90:10 rule. I think we are seeing atomization and within these sub-systems the ratio is trending towards more balance. But again, SOMETIMES.
We have to make a distinction between truly social - ie, non-commercial - interactions vs. commercial interactions. I don’t see much mention of financial transparency in discussions of social-marketing but I see that as HUGE.
And, of course over-arching all of this is the fact that digitally mediated interactions are inherently suspect. When interactions are weightless and frictionsless their value is similarly inflected.
Cheers,
@dugla
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Mel,
As for the 90/9/1 rule, in my personal opinion that will change for certain, if it hasn’t already. We use a process called Seven Modes of the Mind at Mullen that determines whether consumers are spectators, socializers, sharers, searchers, etc. While I don’t have any data to back up this claim, I believe we are seeing more and more people participate as creators for two reasons: one, everyone is becoming more versed in generating video, in blogging (I rarely meet a college student who doesn’t have a blog.) and in making themselves heard in the conversation; two, the proliferation of platforms that make crowd creation easier and more familiar will elevate the comfort level of those who’ve held back. In the case of RF’s connected consumers, it’s likely there are many more content creators than implied in the 90/9/1 rule. Time to move those numbers around.
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Thanks for all of the insightful comments on the Razorfish FEED report. I think Mel did a terrific job in both capturing the essence of the report’s findings as well as the broader implications — and cataloging the ongoing dialogue around it.
I agree with both Edward and Mel that 90:9:1 rule should be re-examined. In my humble opinion, that concept speaks to a time when “social media” was less pervasive. Now it’s part of the culture — and it’s one where updating one’s status has become a lingua franca of sorts. With FB at 250m+ users, the footprint is certainly large enough. “Social media” may have previously been defined as blogging, creating a video for YouTube, engaging on message boards, etc. But that can’t hold today. Thanks to FB & Twitter, the barriers to entry have been so lowered they barely exist — 140 chars suffices. The impact of that, on both consumers and brands, is thrilling and still hard to pinpoint. I hope FEED was a start.
“social networks become the outlet malls of the future.”
I’d go further. As digital technology keeps more and more of us constantly connected, all purchases (online and off (this notion will disappear) will happen in the context of a social network.
So, it’s much more than just the outlet mall. Social Networks, and the realities that come with them will become a pervasive aspect of every buying decision.
As for the 90:9:1 rule, I know that it has already shifted for Facebook. Almost 30% of Facebook users account for the highest level of participation. And this variable is tied to the interconnectedness of the network. (Just looked all over for the source, but can’t find it. If you can find it, please share : )
Completely agree about the notion of off and online. I was initially less convinced “ALL purchases will happen in the context of a social network” (though few people would have said Facebook was a threat to Google a year ago, so was very happy to keep an open mind..) but on reflection I think I was constrained by thinking ‘network = platform’ (Facebook, Twitter etc). I absolutely can imagine products & services finding me based upon a sophisticated algorithm that weighs up past choices made by me and the people whose opinions I trust. All of which is served up on one, utterly personalised, updated in real time, mobile, single login, ‘web-of-me’. iGoogle on crack.
I digress…
We’ve been doing some trawling ourselves in terms of tracking down recent participation data, but by no means do we have swathes of the stuff to prove what we intuitively believe to be true. I suspect this is because this shift has happened more recently than we imagine and the data capture needs to catch up. I have contacted a few likely sources but if anyone can put their hand on something now easily, please share it!
In the meantime, Pats McDonald had this: http://bit.ly/cRoSr, which indicates 40.5% of active Facebook users updated their status in past 7 days and 49.6% of all Twitter users posted an update in past 7 days. The author, Luke Wroblewski, Chief Design Architect at Yahoo!, cites Facebook’s own stats as the source for the former, but - frustratingly - the current update of FB’s stats page http://bit.ly/92hO58 in fact doesn’t cover it. Though the numbers do strongly suggest greater depths of participation (45m status updates each day, 2 billion photos uploaded each month from a universe of over 300m users).
I am now on a mission, so have emailed the Facebook team for an update. Will add their response here if I get anything back.
Edward, Garrick - thank you for your input on the participation point. I think this is an important question to answer as best as we can, for the simple reason that this rule has - indirectly or directly - driven online brand communication & media buying for most clients, for some time. If, as a rule, 90% of an audience only visit/lurk/read online, then it follows you adopt a message-based, outbound approach if you want to ‘hit’ (even the language makes the point) the majority. If that percentage is shifting (in other words, proportionally more people are now comfortable / expect far *greater* levels of interaction as a rule) that represents proof that talk of the power of more engaging online brand experiences is valid. For creative people in marketing and agencies, this should be something to celebrate. What’s more, having read Randall Rothenberg’s piece “Is Marketing a Strategic Resource or a Procured Commodity?” http://j.mp/7pRBaQ, having some tangible proof of behavioural change would be a smart way to re-engage clients in the debate.
The 90-9-1 rule must be considered to be broken, overtaken, dead, burried:
http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2008/10/new-2008-social.html
and
http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2007/04/forresters_new_.html
This is U.S. numbers and Europe numbers are, if I’m not mistaken (they are in my camera which is out of batteries, yes I take photos of print stuff…), even higher.
Not only is it broken - I think we have to re-examine what “creators” and “critics” really are. Do the definitions make sense? Not to me they don’t. When the web is very much made up of aggregated data - that in it self (in different forms) becomes something that makes equally much sense as a blog post - “many critics together actually become creators of something”. Not alone. But aggregated. Do they not?
A tweet is both a small blog post, if you will, and a comment. Streams of tweets, with hash tags become a coherent background, story and so on.
The web is not pages. Written pages. It is bits of stuff that becomes something bigger.
Might be nothing. But It might be think worthy.
The Forrester totals are not supposed to add up to 100% … There’s a lot of overlap, which makes it very hard to compare with the 90/9/1 rule.
I think it depends a lot on what your definition of “content creation” is.
If a comment or a tweet is to be considered on par with a blog post or an uploaded video, then sure, the numbers are way off. As we simplify the ability to participate, the numbers are certain to change.
That said, I continue to believe that the 90/9/1 rule is a damn good indicator of what things look like, in aggregate. Ask yourself these questions: What percentage of people visit Wikipedia versus add/edit it? What percentage of people add reviews to TripAdvisor versus those that read the ratings? What percentage of people blog versus those who read (or perhaps comment) on a blog?
Are all forms of participation equal?
@iboy
I think to George’s point this is very much about how we define content creation. So a status update is not something a user thinks of as “creating content” but aggregated together they provide a content stream for other. In the same (xcellent) piece of analysis from Luke Wroblewski he quantitifies the difference in where content contribution comes from in symmetrical relationships (e.g. Facebook) versus assymetric relationships (e.g. Twitter). 30% of FB content comes from 10% of users, whereas 90% of Twitter content comes from 10% of users. So participation is more evenly spread in a symmetrical model, or where social relationships are tighter. As social networks (in the sense of a symmetrical, two way relationship) proliferate then levels of contribution should increase but I still question whether this means more than a very small percentage will be creating content in the sense we understand it right now-making video, writing involved blog posts, uploading their own music. Perhaps though that just means we need to think about “content” in a new way.
Apologies, should say “aggregated together they provide a content stream for other users”
Agree that how you define the criteria is interesting - Jakob Nielsen’s take is straightforward: it’s about participation, which encompasses frequency of messages posted, as much as it does ‘creation’. For the measure to be meaningful nowadays, perhaps it is - as Pats & George suggest - the definitions that need re-examining. That alone would be a useful exercise.
I absolutely can imagine content creation (or origination in the true sense of the word, if that’s how we choose to define the 1%) being the territory of a rarified few, however it’s the shift in the middle ground - the 9% originally described as ‘intermittent contributors’ (versus the 90% who only ‘read, observe, but do not contribute’) - that is potentially of most interest to marketers and agencies. Who knows, but I think it’s worth finding out for sure if the distribution is in fact rather more even.