Digital Prolixity

This is a long winded response to Asi Sharabi’s post.

Mate! Big issue this. One that I have a very clear view on conveniently

I firmly believe that specialists will ALWAYS be needed at an execution level. Will ‘idea’ agencies ever be able to advise on the best paid search strategies past a fluffy idea of “Let’s advertise against this guy’s name – so if he Google’s himself we can get a message directly to him!”. That kind of thing is definitely awesome etc, but the fact of the matter is businesses generate billions in revenue from this single execution discipline and the same will be true for many other disciplines.

What you’re talking about is business consultancy with a heavy background in creative and lateral thinking planners. Ad agencies, brand consultancies, idea agencies, whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it agencies, have just started to wake up to the fact that they can make really fundamental changes (read improvements) to their clients’ businesses.

This is a side affect of digital culture as we know it; the way a large brand communicates must be grounded in how it behaves and in its beliefs. If they don’t, then their underdog competitors which DO will very quickly eat away at their market share and bottom line as consumers flock to the authentic and nice brands which walk the talk.

For the past few years, businesses have seen this shift as something concerning their communications only which is exactly why and how communications agencies have worked themselves into a much more influential position than has ever been possible. Smart agency people, slowly, over time enlightened those clients into realising that the core problem wasn’t a communication problem at all, but a much deeper issue closer to the heart of the core business. It was purely luck that clients were daft enough to initially think it was a communication problem first which let us communication folks get our foot in the door.

What we’re seeing is agencies morphing into business consultants with a very strong background in creativity and strategic thinking. The business consultancy being provided will naturally extend to communications, but won’t be exclusively around communications.

This high level strategic thinking and creative however doesn’t affect skill specific disciplines – it just changes the nomenclature. A digital agency in 5 years will be a digital production agency. A social media company will be basically a company of community managers and social media managers who understand the intricacies of online communities to a very high level of detail.

And so on.

The only part of the industry that is contracting is the PowerPoint end of the industry. So yes – agencies founded on PowerPoint  will “turn into idea shops (weren’t they always?) and the best ideas will win the business (didn’t they always?)”. The people who actually make shit / do shit will always be needed.

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The same day that Facebook announced details of ‘Open Graph’ I wrote a post about how it could fundamentally improve the web user experience. One of the potential applications I mentioned was good implementation of ‘social search’.

Back in the day (2008) I remember the handy Forrester Research graph which showed that search engines were considered to be a highly trusted source of information (relatively speaking), but of course the most trusted being information from people you actually know. There are many graphs / tables like this out there on the web all showing pretty similar data, so the exact graph chosen was irrelevant.

The important thing is – with the introduction of Facebook’s Open Graph, it has never been easier to integrate 2 of the most trusted sources of information to create an incredibly powerful ‘Trust engine’… and yet it hasn’t been done? What I can’t understand is… why not? The image above is an artist’s representation of how you could easily create a powerful search engine that incorporates quality results, powered by complex algorithms & the power of relationship based P2P recommendations. Of course this is very basic – a better way would be to have a piece of result, on-screen ‘real estate’ dedicated to these recommended results to make it very easy for people to see which results their friends thought were good.

People have a habit of finding immediate peer groups who have similar interests to themselves, and this will naturally lead to sharing similar behaviours, including their search behaviour. It stands to reason that if myself and all of my friends are big fans of Metallica, that there’s a good chance that at some point we’ll type ‘Metallica’ into a search engine – for news, tickets, merch … whatever. This also extends to people who are working in the same industry, or students who are reading the same subjects and are doing the same course work.

If my friends have been researching a topic that we’re writing an essay on, and have found brilliant resources through a search engine that have helped them with their work; ‘liking’ a result will immediately bring it to my attention if I search for the same thing. The image above highlights what it might look like if a Biology student is doing some research on Sonic Hedgehog proteins (seriously… there are a class of proteins called this).

People already share links with each other over e-mail, IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook etc but these require active consideration from the person making the recommendation as well as involved effort to transmit the information. The idea of ‘liking’ search results takes this out of the equation and simply reduces the transaction and opportunity cost of making the recommendation. Instead, you could broadcasting that recommendation to everyone in your immediate peer group with a single click and even in situations where you wouldn’t normally send links to people, the simple inclusion of a like button next to search results will prompt people to use it meaning that people will end up recommending dozens if not hundreds of search results on a weekly basis instead of the 2 or 3 they might send around by e-mail usually.

In my opinion, this extremely simple implementation of social search is enough to massively improve the experience of a search engine. Considering Bing is scrabbling for market share, and already owns almost 2% of Facebook – I can’t understand what is standing in their way from doing something this. Tiny change, massive impact. In terms of business decisions, it seems like a no-brainer to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments.

As I’m sure everyone is aware – Facebook effectively told the world that it planned on taking over the internet with something as simple as a ‘Like’ button. The Levi’s example above really brings to life how it can change your web experience and ultimately make it so much better.

The number of applications for this is insane – but also the amount of data it allows Facebook to collect about you is even worse. The surprising thing is that no one seems to mind (yet), if it were Google that had implemented such a fundamentally game changing bit of functionality to the web – the first thing that would have happened would be them being formally investigated by the DoJ or some such. Don’t worry though – no one seems to mind that Facebook will know how fat your ass is (not hard to tell if you keep ‘liking’ size 14 jeans).

Having said this – lets talk about some other applications here.

• Search results: For any given search, at the top of the results will be results ‘liked’ by your friends for those keywords. Why trust the top results which are engineered by SEO agencies (to some degree) when your friends will tell you which sites they found useful? Especially useful for Students who are studying the same classes – and likely doing the same research. You’d have to just remember to not be a dumbass and ‘like’ your favourite porn sites.

• Gaming: Log into Steam and see which of the latest games your friends enjoy, and easily let you find your real world friends who are currently playing so you can go straight to the server they’re playing on. Currently Steam has similar functionality for ‘game’ friends – but being able to find your real world friends easily would be really useful. Also has broader application of you creating leaderboards that are specific to your real world mates.

• RSS readers: Even with RSS readers, people experience a crazy overload of information – most of which is pretty rubbish. With the ‘like’ function, you can easily find the articles that are probably going to be most relevant to you, allowing you to de-prioritize the rest of the ‘noise’ until you’ve got some proper time to go through them.

These are just a couple off the top of my head – there’s going to be a HUGE number of other ways to improve the existing web using Facebook’s new API. Businesses will be built on it. Let me know if you’ve got any other great ideas for applications – or keep them to yourself if you think they’ll make you a millionaire