Who provided the presentation: Paul Adams, at thinkoutsidein.com, is a lead researcher for social at Google. He investigates how people use social media. He works on Buzz and YouTube. He wrote a book, Social Circles. It’s out in August.

Rumor mill: Mr. Adams’s observations could provide insight into how Google might approach its rumored competitor to Facebook, Google Me.

Get on with it: The slide show of the presentation is embedded below, and after it I’ve provided a list of 36 slides (out of 216), along with descriptions of them, that I found particularly interesting. I copied the language from the slides or slightly modified it for brevity.

15
The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.

17
The social web is not a fad, and it’s not going away. it’s not an add-on to the web as we know it today. It’s a fundamental change, a re-architecture, and in hindsight its evolution is obvious.

19
The web was originally built to link static documents together, but evolved to incorporate social media, and now we’re seeing the web built around people, where their profiles and content are moving with them as they visit different websites.

28
People are increasingly likely to find out about products and brands from their friends rather than from your business. It means that it is much harder to control how people first come to experience your messages.

32
Almost all the sites and apps we design from now on will have embedded social features.

33
Understanding sociability will become a core requirement for designing online. Almost all of us will need to become skilled in social web design.

34
The social web, and all social media that operate within it, is a way of thinking as opposed to a new channel. It’s not about sales, or ads, or click-through rates. It’s about pursuing relationships and fostering communities of consumers. It’s about rethinking how you make plans when your customers are in the center and in control.

35
Understand behavior, not technology: The people using [technology] don’t care about [it]; they care about the communication that the technology enables.

42
A better long term strategy for business is to understand people’s motivations for using new technologies, and not the technologies themselves.

47 – 52
When we sign up, most social networks ask us to create our “friends” group, but no such group exists offline (47-48). … Offline people have multiple groups of friends that form around life stages and shared experiences (52) … Despite trying to mix them, people’s groups remain independent (68).

People create messages on their social networks for a portion of their social network, but their entire network receives the message.

84
Avoid the use of the word friend for connecting people. Understand how people describe their relationships for the behavior you’re trying to encourage.

Allow people to create custom names for groups, and allow people to rename the group if it changes over time.

Support side conversations. Allow people to fork conversation threads with a smaller number of people.

90
Though we have unique relationships with each person in a group in our social network, “all our ‘friends’ are treated equally on social networks, and all our contacts appear alphabetically and equal in our mobile phones.”

112
So much of our lives revolve around our strong ties, and we need to think about designing for them as distinct from other types of relationships. “Strong tie” relationships are our most connected, most important ones; familial relationships, for example. These relationships often involve physical proximity, are maintained over long periods of time, are interacted with very regularly.

113
Versus weak ties: People you know but don’t care much about. Characteristics: Infrequent communication, friends of friends

115
Most of us can stay up-to-date with up to 150 weak ties. This is a limitation of our brain. This number has been consistent throughout history.

Then several slides providing interesting examples of groups reaching 150 members, and then rupturing or intentionally splitting off into new groups.

123
Social networks changed weak-tie relationships by making it easier for updating ourselves on developments in them (no more phone calls, or meetings). Just check out their activity stream; “it gives us a lightweight route to get back in touch. This is a powerful route when we’re sourcing new information.”

125
But strong and weak ties are not enough when we think of relationships online. We need a new category of tie, and I call it the temporary tie. Temporary ties are people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with.

133
You don’t know these people beyond the one conversation you had, or the words they typed and whatever online profile they have. Your interaction with them is temporary. With the rise of user generated content online, temporary ties are becoming more important.

134
As designers, the biggest thing we need to think about when designing for temporary tie interaction is trust.

138
Don’t try to design something for all types of relationships. You’ll simply end up with a compromised solution for everyone. Understand which types of relationship ties are most important for what you’re creating, and design primarily for them.

141
In a world of many types of messages, four things that businesses need to consider when choosing the best communication features for their consumers:

1) The other person and their relationship
2) The content being communicated
3) The urgency of reply required
4) The level of privacy required

146
Different communication tools are better for different types of communication. Provide the one appropriate to your users’ needs.

153
We rely on others to make decisions: “If we want people to use our products, to use our website, it is important that we design in features that support our friends making decisions for us.”

155
How people influence each other is complex, and the role of “influentials” in society is over-estimated.

160
Whether someone can be influenced is as important as the strength of the influencer.

162
Two factors in understanding whether someone can be influenced: 1) What their social network looks like; 2) What they have experienced before.

164
The more people that give us an opinion, the less influenced we are by any one of those opinions.

173
Consider how to display multiple opinions, and how different versions might change people’s behavior.

179
People care deeply about how they look to others.

180
The most important thing to recognize about identity is that people don’t have one identity.

181
Online, it is hard to set things up so that one group sees you one way and another group sees you a different way. This has to, and will, change.

191
Some suggestions to enhance the ways people are allowed to represent themselves online.

204
Our systems need to be absolutely transparent and it is critical that we design this in. People need to understand the consequences of their actions, and we, as designers, need to do our best to make these things clear.

Recap: 212-216
1) Design for multiple groups (for example, true friends, family, colleagues, hobbies) in social networks.
2) Design for different relationships (strong ties, weak ties, temporary ties).
3) Design tools to give people options on how they present different online identities to different groups and individuals.

Found via Skeptic Geek

For about $1,300, the ad (see 3:01 point):

1. Showed 7 times on Glenn Beck episodes
2. Ran 54 times on four cable networks
3. Picked up 1.3 million total views
4. Generated more than 1,000 visitors to vcantellyouwhy.com, a site they set up to track the ad’s efficacy

Here is the ad and a description of its creation:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peqnSTBnTVk[/youtube]

As the narrator says at about 3:19, “The advertising industry won’t crumble overnight. But it’s easy to see that the barriers to entry have been lowered. And it might not be long before you’re promoting your blog or your punk band or your line of Christmas ornaments with an ad campaign on national TV.”

Yep, the Web again puts the tools of distribution into the hands of the people who need them, reducing the cost and inefficiency of using a middle man.

If you don’t have the time or skill to create your own ad, Google will find someone to do it in its ad creation marketplace. I see an opportunity here with the slow turnaround times of even the simplest ads; one firm needed 7 days to supply a roughly $500 montage of images with bad text.

Would it be possible, for example, to leverage your personal or business’s network to make an ad of satisfied customers? You know, Customer A does a short Web cam clip of saying how great your product is. Customer B repeats. So on and so forth.  To see how one band did just this for a music video, check out this post I wrote about it: To make your media masterpiece with the masses, divide projects into specific steps.

Of course, SlateV’s video about the process itself is an even better ad for the site than the one it made for national TV. That’s for a couple of reasons that demonstrate why “advertising” needs to become more like journalism:

1. It does not overtly attempt to persuade; it respects my time and attempts to provide information; it is helping me, not (overtly) manipulating me; it is “how to,” not attempted hypnosis
2. It is open to sharing and embedding; as a result, SlateV gets linked to from this blog

“Denver journalism students are writing Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move to the web en masse.”

“‘I see journalism as being completely online within the next two to five years,’ said a journalism instructor at the University of Denver. ‘If you’re not trained to expect that and write for that, then you’re not going to be ready for the work world.’”

Hm. Training for the next “work world” involves producing content for a site that runs on volunteer labor.

I expect journalism as a career path to more and more go the way of the fine arts. It will, like painting or creative writing, become much more a mostly unpaid pursuit of passion that occasionally blooms into something financially rewarding if your piece of work happens to raise enough interest (and you’re able to work incredibly hard and long without a promise of any monetary payment). It will go from holding down a position as a human factory of regular content to a floating freelance dance responding to requests or praying for a hit. From marketing to connecting. From telling to conversing. From self-expression to self-positioning. From performing to channeling. From exploiting to evolving. From audience to collaborator.

The Web is a gigantic tool box, and everyone’s published thoughts are the raw material. Remixing is the rule. Embrace it and you might be able to make a music video collection, for sale on your Amazon store, of old time jazz greats performing death metal tunes. Cut the revenues with all of the creative folks involved.

Is there an audience for this? 117,582 views say there is.

Via Sue.

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media.

Don’t look at old and new media, look at old and new media customers. What does each want? Are they distinct? Can one organization provide everything? Oh, and why is the blog described as “rogue”?

Onward State happily promotes a competitor’s story with direct links, while The Collegian questions the very logic of such a strategy. …  A symbolic move which tells readers to “go read our competition” would be devastating to the trust they’ve worked for over a century to gain, according to The Collegian’s editor.

This represents an attitude toward people’s attention. On one hand, “old media” sees attention as something to be captured, exploited and isolated, even to the information disadvantage of the person supplying the attention. “New media” sees attention as something to direct to the greatest information advantage of the person supplying the attention. I believe an information service that best meets a customer’s needs, even at a short-term sacrifice of its business interests, will prevail in the competition for attention (but getting people’s money is a whole other problem; advertising is a business built on failures that in large part no longer exist).

“Money making is not something that we’ve really embraced yet,” said Davis Shaver, founder of Onward State.

Via

In case cookies evaded your understanding, this gizmo simplifies your control of them when it comes to an encounter with a paywall or registration request.

The journalism business was never the content. It was the distribution; it was the channel. Media companies had a road and a dellivery van to people’s minds that nobody else did. Now there is a plethora of roads and the customers are the ones doing the driving; they visit a business whenever they want. Information is easy now. Meaning, always difficult, is even harder.

Via Journerdism

There is a reason Steve Jobs kept saying the iPad was like the Internet in your hands. Implied in the statement is a reduction of operationally infinite medium into a discrete package, and businesses sure like discrete units because they fit into neat revenue formulas that don’t require an endless chase after page views in an infinitely expanding advertising space (though, interestingly, Google would seem to like this). The only problem with treating digital goodies like real-world ones is that you rip a good chunk of the Internet’s power right out of its guts. I suspect we will look back upon this era of remarkably free information with envy and awe in the coming decades. Bummer.

The Web is a feed; peope will shape it as they see fit. Fighting this is like trying to stop a charging elephant with a desk fan. Embracing it? I suppose people might pay for optmiization of your data to make their gizmo function better (or to save them the time of taking your data part).

Summary: No deed goes unpunished.

Some points:

1. Each article (or content item) has a different economic value, but the cost of a sale remains significant per article.
2. So, in a collective, more profitable content will need to subsidize less profitable content.
3. Pre-paid accounts for customers would be the most efficient way to make microsales, and one-off price articles would need to be in the $2 – $10 range to be “worth the effort.”
4. Newspapers will need to figure out in advance how to price an article (which means more staff) according to its expected value, price it by the cost of producing it, or figure out the average cost of producing all the articles and price according to that. Yep, each method has its problems.
5. And what exactly is in this for the consumer? If they don’t pay for news in print, or online, then what will they be offered to make them consider doing so now? On a per-transaction basis?

I believe the media world is shifting away from creating destination stories that attempt to capture audiences. This is connected to the cultural shifts underway due to our new, Internet-bred ability to acquire in-depth information on just about anything anytime we want it.

We are moving toward becoming a even more largely freelance, information service industry, with various presentations of stories as one product on a spectrum. The core value to be pursued, more than ever before, is original information; additional value is derived from it when it is used to create other information products that provide value to someone else. Endless game of dominoes.

In the past, whenever I thought of diving into any kind of media business, I looked only to offer an audience-capturing experience (a typical story). Now I am required to ask: What other information producers will my information serve and how? Can I sell that? I am a node in a network in addition to being an endpoint.

For example, would I open a shoe store today? Create this giant location, fill it with a variety of shoes, some more valuable then others, and hope enough people show up to exceed my costs?

Probably not. First I would think about what business I’m really in. Protecting people’s feet? Providing a fashionable selection? Giving them the chance to physically handle products?

Because if you think about it, a shoe store is in a lot of businesses:

1. It’s in the storage business (jamming all those shoes into a space);
2. it’s in the opinion business (employees providing feedback on shoes);
3. it’s in the information filtering business (selling some shoes, but not others);
4. it’s in the marketing business (all those shoes advertise their makers);
5. it’s in the distribution business (a store is a node on a manufacturer’s distribution network);
6. it’s in the health business (the wrong shoes can kill your feet);
7. it’s in the fashion business (want to look good for that big meeting?);
8. it’s in just about every business you can imagine, if you get out your magnifying lens.

What the Internet does is potentially separate the value of the “physical-ness” of any business from the intangible, information-only value of that business.

Previously, information was a product enhancer; it is now the product itself, but business models haven’t caught up. Or have they? iTunes? Trade publications?

Another example: movie theaters. What are you paying for when you buy a ticket? For me, it’s a bundle of experiences: a big, dark room, good sound, massive screen, a chance to go out, a story to get lost in. I cannot perfectly replicate these values in my apartment. What a moviemaker has to decide is if she/he is in the business of providing entertainment products that can play a part in certain cultural experiences, or in the business of trying to ensnare an audience. Or both.

Because people just don’t pay for stories, they pay for the experience the story is an important part of. Your story could be valuable in the creation of many experiences, if you make an effort to identify and market to them. But how valuable? I don’t think it will be valuable enough to consistently support monolithic organizations. The value of a story is just not that consistently stable or predictable.