Monthly Archives: February 2010

Sifting my Dunbar number out of siloed data

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You’ve probably heard more than you care to about the Dunbar number – the idea in sociology that you cannot maintain more than 150 real friendships. I began to wonder about myself. How many people do I really contact in a given period of time – say a month? This started me on revealing a journey into my own social graph.

Your social graph is all of the people that you are connected to online. I keep profiles on a number of social sites, but I only really keep up my LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts. What I realized is that many of the people that I talk to day-in and day-out are not on these sites – or at least we don’t use them to stay in touch. Perhaps this is a function of my age (>40), or some other factor, but my curiosity grew regarding the Dunbar number, how it related to me and how it might impact us all as our number of “friends” (i.e. our social graph) continues to grow. So, I decided to turn the analysis around on myself.

My first task (and problem) was how to find my own Dunbar number?

How do I connect to the people that I know and talk to on a regular basis? That part was easy. I email, talk on the phone and text (in rank order). What’s not easy is getting to the data. Well, getting to the data was easy because my phone bills are online, and so are all my emails, but porting the data is another issue. It cannot be exported into any form that allows me to analyze it. You have to get it all by hand. So, after a little cut-and-paste I had my calls and texts in Excel, but it was just a long line of dates, times, phone numbers, lengths of calls and total messages sent.

Isn’t this my data? Shouldn’t it be easier for me to analyze? Wouldn’t the phone company be doing me a service by at least allowing me to pull the feed into some kind of analytic tools ala Mint (if they are not going to serve me by looking at it for me and offering better products and services to meet my needs)? But I digress…literally back into my useless data set.

Faced with a useless mass of data, I needed to cull it down, sift and sort it, and then find an apples-to-apples way to compare the people I call the most (quantitative) and to factor in the way that I am contacting them (qualitative).

So, I created my own personal Dunbar Index.

I looked in detail at my phone calls and consolidated them down to how many calls I made/received and the total minutes of talk time. I also logged how many text messages that I send. Because I call more people than I text, texting needed to rank differently. In fact, I only text a certain people that I know better, so I needed to weight the texts more heavily. I chose an arbitrary 2.5 factor. Next, I created a very simple index out of the two numbers and matched them to my phone list. I made the actual numbers anonymous and then charted them.

Click on the charts to enlarge them.

Dunbar number for phone and text

Total Call/Text Index

Dunbar Graph sans top 3

You can see in the first one that the index has a long tail. Out of 80-ish phone calls and texts, only less than 10 make up the bulk of the volume. Even when I factor out the top 3 (second chart) because they are my spouse/home and my Google Voice voice mail and Calendar contacting me, you can see that the bulk of my calls are under 30 minutes for the month (the red line). I was surprised how many total people that I called, and how much I talked to just a few people. But this is only part of the story.

What about email?

I am a gmail user, and I love the service, but I cannot figure out an automated way to count how many emails that I sent and to whom during these same 30 days besides just counting by hand. And I’ve looked. If anyone has any ideas about how to do this, I’m all ears. Otherwise, I’ll try and hand count (it’s just a 30 day period), and then factor it into my index. This would give me realistic look at my own Social Graph using the media that I prefer to communicate with them.

So, how does this compare to my online Social Graph? And what (if anything) does this mean?

As I mentioned, I keep up my profiles and contacts via LinkedIn (tends to be more professional), Facebook (tends to be more personal), Twitter (tends to be…random), and now Buzz (just a few people). But my use of these sites is different, and has left me wondering how it integrates into my daily communication habits and patterns. And this has me wondering about all of the people that my clients are trying to reach about their varied products and services.

Markets diverge. Plain and simple. There will not be a universal device. You are going to have 4 and then 5 and then 6 screens in your life with apps and data running on all of them. Getting to all of your data – it is yours and mine after all – but getting to your data and porting it to other services (like Mint or Trip-It for example) will be important in order to realize all the possibilities that the ecosystem of networked screens affords to you.

My data is stored across so many different databases and interfaces that it is almost impossible for me to consolidate all of it. All of our data is this way. It is locked away in multiple different locations, which makes any kind of macro-level analysis impossible or incredibly labor intensive. Imagine trying to do this with 100K names or 100MM. This is a big challenge for marketers today, and it is only going to get worse.

As more sites spring up asking us to create profiles we just keep perpetuating the problem; compounding it. The freedom of this data, or at least the portability of it is a key feature of the much promised, but yet-to-be-realized Web 3.0. The web of data that can be ported, sifted, sorted, repurposed and mashed-up into all kinds of useful ways is right now just a pipe dream. But I think we are all hoping for it, and looking forward not to the freedom of our data, but the benefits that it will give to us from financial analysis and truly virtual assistants to things that will not be imagined until this future becomes just a bit more real.

What is an hour of your attention worth?

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Lost (TV series)

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Read the very disappointing cover story on my new Fortune magazine that came in the mail today. I’ll post more about it with observations when I have more time. But Jeff Jarvis was interviewed for the story and he had an interesting comment about attention. It got me thinking about all of the media and entertainment products, how much of our attention they consume, and their monetary value.
So, here is a (really) rough calculation of all that I can find easily:
  1. Video Games (take Madden as an example). $60 per unit. I read a stat that for Madden players at 2.5 hours per week = 125 hours per year. Your attention hour value is $0.48 to EA.
  2. DVD’s. $20 per unit. 2 hours per movie. Your attention hour value is $10.
  3. Movies. Average ticket price $7.18 according to MPAA. Average movie 2 hours. Attention hour value $3.59.
  4. TV. Take a dramatic show like Lost. It’s about :45 minutes of content and :15 minutes of ads (give or take). A :30 spot averages $133,774 (per data I dug up). That’s about $4MM for an episode with 11.4MM total viewers. That’s $0.35 per attention hour. We watch 6 or so hours a day for your daily attention netting $2.11 (and that’s really generous).
  5. Books. A new hardback runs $25, and will take you 20 hours to read. That’s $1.25 per attention hour.
  6. Magazines. Take that Fortune magazine I read. The published rate is $124K (I know, I know). 106 pages in the magazine, I’ll be generous and say there was 50 ad pages (I’m not going to count them). That’s $6.2MM on a base of 830K. Say you read it cover to cover in 4 hours. That’s an hour attention value of $1.86.
  7. Newspapers. Ugh. Anyone want to take a stab here? Let’s take the NYT and say it really does have 1.45MM readers. Their total revenue for news is $2.3B for a total of $1,586.20 per reader. Let’s say they spend 10 hours per week and 500 hours per year with content. That’s an hour attention value of $3.17.

So, here it is again, in Hour Attention Value order:

  1. DVD. $10.00
  2. Movies. $3.59
  3. Newspaper. $3.17
  4. Magazines. $1.86
  5. Books. $1.25
  6. Video Games. $0.48
  7. TV. $0.35 (cable fees add another $0.27)

Best I can do with free data, but it starts to get at a new kind of metric. Namely, what is the value of an hour of my time to the various media and entertainment companies that I give my money, and more importantly, my attention to? I give money directly to the entertainment companies (DVD, Movie, Book, Video Games), so this is a cost to me. But the media companies are making this money off of me in exchange for my attention. Yes, I have to pay $50+ a month for cable fees to access the programming, but it’s an attention swap.

What Jarvis pointed out is that all content is a value exchange with our attention. I wanted to begin to dig into this idea and see exactly how much money an hour of my time is worth. Yes, the margins differ and there are economies of scale, but this is a first stab at building a metric that can be consistent across formats for properties that have scale.

Thoughts?

Posted via email from Sean Womack’s Stream

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The 4-to-1 Ratio

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We have a 4:1 input to output ratio on our head — why is it so hard to use them in this proportion?

Seeing and Hearing are art forms. Really Seeing and really Hearing are anyway. The act of observation. The art of listening. Even when we listen we are watching – what is the body language? what are the facial expressions? I read somewhere (I’ll look for it) that we pick-up on 200+ non-verbal signals when we are talking to someone. Even pupil dilation is saying something to us that we learn over time. If we are observant.

It is hard to do because it goes against our culture.

We live in a talk, write, speak, hear me, HEAR ME culture. Look at what I’m doing – making a blog post kinda criticizing the very thing I’m doing. The tools are readily available and basically free, so we are writing, posting and publishing our little hearts out. But it’s not just that our culutre has become celebrity (even micro-celebrity) focused, I think it is human nature to want to be heard, to be validated by our peers and superiors, and to be accepted into the club. Who doesn’t want to be thought of well? But our constant need to speak (in all it’s forms) is causing us to miss out on the rewards of observation, reflection and thought. And doing those three will make your speaking immensely more valuable.

Being observant means being outwardly passive but inwardly alert, curious and probing.

Paco Underhill talks about his observations of people shopping in Why We Buy and The Call of the Mall. Malcolm Gladwell is a master of observation in his reporting. Seth Godin observes the world of marketing (and business broadly) in his blog and book. It is the insights gained during patient listening, intellectually probing, and careful observing even the slightest details that allow these men to write about human nature in such unique ways. Yes, they have a craft at writing, but they have a craft at observing as well.

How do we develop the craft of Seeing and Hearing?

  1. Be quiet(er). Try the 4:1 ratio out (two eyes + two ears = 4 inputs). Next time you are in a conversation or a meeting, See & Hear 4 minutes for each minute you speak.
  2. Be present. It is easy to let our minds wonder about while someone else is doing something. Watched the airline attendant do the safety demonstration lately? Try to next time, and see what you can discern about him or her just by observing.
  3. Ask questions. Get good at this. We have a practice in our family called “highlights.” Each night (that we eat dinner together) everybody in the family gives their highlights from the day. We each do our best to give full attention, not interrupt, and then we each have to ask a question about the highlight.

Yes, that last point sounds a bit like parenting, but try it out. Take a week, or a day if that is too daunting, and make yourself ask a question of everyone who tells you something. Not everything mind you. If your spouse asks you to run to the store, then I would not suggest asking “why?” Perhaps a “can I do anything else while I’m out” instead.

No, this is for conversations…oh, you’ll know the right ones. Just try it out. Let me know how it goes.

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Jeff Jarvis & Jaiku’s Founder discuss Google Buzz http://bit.ly/cLa9VW

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Jyri Engeström, the founder of Jaiku, is a brilliant thinker who has the best thoughts on Buzz that I've heard to date. Jarvis adds a bit to the conversation, but it's worth just running this in the background while you work for Jyri's insights.

Listen to it here: http://bit.ly/cLa9VW

Thanks for my friend Bill Sobel for pointing this out to me.

Posted via email from Sean Womack’s Stream

If you are not willing to be bad at something, you’ll never learn how to be good.

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I’m noticing a trend — many (most?) of the people moaning about Google Buzz have not actually created a product of their own and put it out there.Five thoughts…

  1. It was smart for Google to get into the space now (i.e. Titan is coming).
  2. It was smart for them to integrate it into an existing platform (versus yet another – ff anyone?).
  3. It will be smart if they continue to make it work better (see WSJ.com – if you subscribe…grrr).
  4. It will be smart if they do that quickly (time will tell).
  5. It is smart that Mashable (and a few others), are engaging in the space.

Those who are engaging vs. bemoaning are doing two things for all of us:

  1. Making the product better through real use not speculation, and
  2. Showing us ways to use the product well right now

The longer I work in the world of ideas, the more I realize that actually rolling up your sleeves and doing something: making a product, building a website, writing a paper – or even a blog post – is better than not doing anything.

Hats off to Mashable for always embracing the new, and helping us figure out how we can use it. They have a bias toward action that is admirable.

Is anyone else doing anything interesting with Buzz right now? (complainers need not apply)

Posted via email from Sean Womack’s Stream

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Deconstruction instead of brainstorming

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Brainstorming is taught as the primary tool for creative thinking.

The problem is it doesn’t work.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some who do it well. IDEO is legendary for their ability to brainstorm. They have rules painted on the walls. Everyone learns them. It works for them. They are the exception, not the rule We’ve all been in really bad brainstorming meetings. You know what I’m talking about – the ten minute burst of energy followed by the twenty minutes of crazy, useless ideas and the requisite eyerolling and explanations about “no bad ideas.”

I’ll let you in on a secret: there are bad ideas and brainstorming is one of them.

There are three reasons why brainstorming doesn’t work:

  1. People come unprepared to a meeting.
  2. Facilitating is not as easy as a (really good) facilitator makes it look.
  3. Brainstorming works on too big of a problem.

Here, try something with me. Get out a piece of paper and a pen and write down all of the innovations you can think of for a pencil. Take 60 seconds and list out as many as you can. (Not a very long list is it?) Okay, turn the sheet over.

We’re going to try a different approach — deconstruction. First, make bullet pointed answers to the following questions:

  1. Describe the pencil. What is it made of? What shape is it? How is it made?
  2. Tell me about its function. Who uses it? How is it used? To do what?

Second, take another 60 seconds and give me ideas for innovating the pencil. Work your way thru these individual elements (your answers to the two questions above) and list out your innovations. (cue 60 seconds of music) Finished?

Compare the two lists. Which one is longer? Which one has better, more novel ideas to pursue?

I call this tool deconstruction.

It’s based on the way that language works on our brain. When you see a pencil, your brain pulls together a host of past experiences and mental connections in order to let you know it is a pencil. This helps you get thru life easier than if every time you saw an 8 inch long, 1/4 inch thick hexagonal cedar tube filled with a thin cylinder of graphite and painted yellow you thought, “I wonder if this would be a good mark-making device?” You just simply know it’s a pencil, and that you can write or draw with it.

But this is a sizable problem for creative thinking and product innovation. It’s hard to see possibilities, and that’s the core of both creative thinking and innovation – finding new solutions, opportunities and possibilities.

So instead of just trying to invent a new version of the whole, we deconstruct the object. We break it down into its physical structure, its uses, its users or consumers, how it’s manufactured – even how it’s bought, sold, stored, shipped, etc. Innovations can come from any one of these elements – just by tweaking the right one (e.g. size, material, shape). A walk thru any office supply superstore will show you dozens of novel and useful iterations on the simple pencil.

Deconstruction can be used on nouns (i.e. things and stuff – places, too) but it also works on verbs – processes and methods. It’s simple to teach. It requires no prep work. And it puts a room in the right frame of mind for creative thinking and innovation.

So, next time you find yourself in a lame brainstorm. Stop and start deconstructing.

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Where Kevin Rose’s idea for Digg was born

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Just saw this on Bryson Moore’s blog, and think it is a great photo for a three reasons:

1. It shows the power of thinking visually.
2. It shows how to get ideas down on paper.
3. It shows that tools you love help facilitate #1 and #2.

I don’t know Kevin, and I don’t use Digg that much, but I like his taste in notebooks and writing instruments.

Creative thinking requires the right tools, and those are two very practical and very powerful ones.

Go out and buy a pen and a notebook you will love, and that you will use. I have a shelf full of Moleskines and a cup full of these pens. You will use them more if you love them.

And the key to great ideas is to have a lot of ideas — and get them on paper fast.

Posted via web from Sean Womack’s Stream

The Google Ad

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I have not read any of the commentary about the Google ad yet, and for a reason. I wanted to get down my opinions of it untainted by anyone else’s opinions because I’ve rarely seen something that so defied my expectations.

Everyone talks about Google taking over every business that they move in to. Most of the conversation is about their dominance, their size, their goal to get all the world’s information. We speculate about their moves and their motives. Lately, we’ve even begun to take their search engine to task saying that keywords have run their course.

They know all of this, of course. But they did not address it. Not directly anyway.

What they chose to do is put themselves right in the middle of life. Not everyone’s life either – just their little part of one particular drama. They just showed how the simple thing that they do – help you find information on the web – helps in so many important moments in life.

This is brilliant advertising.

And it is by a company that did not need to build awareness or grow share. They have all of those that they need.

No, this was meant to show how something as simple as a search engine can help facilitate something elusive and tender and human as a budding romance come about. It is a brilliant piece of film. Fully branded, perfectly scored. Spot on emotionally.

For all the talk about the capital “c” Conversation in marketing, and all the hyperbole about the ruination of the :30 spot. This reinforced the power of the medium of film to deliver what no conversation ever could. It moves you emotionally. It conjured up a story – completely in our heads – that we all wanted to be a part of (even football guys in some small way).

It opened up the heart to emotions we’d never associated with Google.

And it didn’t need a baby or a monkey or a Clydesdale to do it.

Comcast Launches XFINITY

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via blog.comcast.com

Hmmm…we never like these changes, and it’s always easy to take a cheap shot at rebrands. I’m remembering back to Anderson Consulting’s shift to Accenture and how hated it was. Now, Accenture seems like it’s been here forever.

Same with this shift — Comcast to xfinity — it’s not hard to imagine how the selling of this went internally. Link to infinity and all the choices. The “x” is about a crossroads or intersection of services — or even alluding to an x-ray. I’ve done enough of these pitches to know the spiel.

At the end of the day, renaming does a couple of things. First, it gives us something to write, moan, complain, pontificate, critique about, and second, it does signal change. We can act like it doesn’t or that no one cares, but it does signal it and it works.

So, laugh or criticize all you like, but in a few years, we’ll forget that they used to be comcast. Because a name is an empty container that must be filled with meaning. If they deliver on promise to customers, then the name will be meaningful. If you don’t, then no name will save you.

Posted via web from Sean Womack’s Stream

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Demoted to Gold

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American Airlines demoted me to Gold.

I got a very nice pre-printed letter in the mail informing me that I did not qualify for Platinum status any more. They said that if I wanted to pay either $549 or $629 to reinstate my Platinum status then I could. Thanks to Apple, I know know that’s the price of a mid-tier iPad. So, do I think being Platinum is worth an iPad?

space

For context, I have flown 1 million miles with American.

This is not me making it up. It’s printed on my frequent flyer card. They were the ones to point it out. In fact, they made a big deal out of it and sent me another one of their pre-printed letters. That and they printed it on my frequent flyer card. It’s still on the new Gold one they just sent me.

So, I started thinking — what is it I get for being platinum anyway?

I’m very familiar with all the list of features and benefits from American. I’ve read the brochures. But for the life of me, I cannot think of a single benefit besides 72 hour upgrades. And most of my flights are commuter direct flights with no first class. So, I have 40+ unused segment upgrades just sitting in an account. I like the Admirals Club, but I’ve paid extra for that.

The truth is, anything that American is offering me pales in comparison to not flying as much.

My work allows me be home more. And because I am home I see my kids more. I’m coaching basketball, and driving them to school. We have dinner together, and I get the read to them before bed. A few of my clients are start-ups and I like to do what I can to save them money. American is consistently the most expensive flights for me – especially compared to Expedia or Kayak.

And it’s not just American. My hotels, rental cars, etc are all cheaper my disregarding my loyalty cards and buying online. I can get all the points I want via my credit card programs, which makes me a very disloyal traveler and less profitable to them. But it seems more profitable to me just about any way that I think about it.

So, I’m thankful to American for their attempted slight. And in light of the upcoming Olympic games, I’m reminded that gold’s not a bad thing.

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