Creating Passionate Users

Seven Blog Virtues (for a Global Microbrand)

I was on a panel at SXSWi based on Hugh MacLeod's Global Microbrand idea. My slides for that panel were very lightweight--nothing meaty, just an orientation that I believe is really important if you're trying to attract more readers. I've added a little text to the slides and made a PDF here:

Download SevenVirtues.pdf (4.7 MBs)

So, no secret tips and tricks, just a way of thinking about blogging for the purpose of building a Global Microbrand (whether the brand is you, your product, a cause, etc.).

These slides are under a CC non-commercial, with attribution license, so fee free to use them.

Is Twitter TOO good?

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

[Disclaimer: I'm SO in the minority on this one... it looks like about a hundred-to-one in favor of Twitter, so I'm most likely way wrong on this one (but it doesn't stop me from trying). And this post is mostly a mashup of a variety of earlier posts I've made on related subjects.]

I'll look at each of the three points in more detail:

1) The Twitter Slot Machine

One of Skinner's most important discoveries is that behavior reinforced intermittently (as opposed to consistently) is the most difficult to extinguish. In other words, intermittent rewards beat predictable rewards. It's the basis of most animal training, but applies to humans as well... which is why slot machines are so appealing, and one needn't be addicted to feel it.

From a Time magazine feature story on multitasking:
Patricia Wallace, a techno-psychologist,...believes part of the allure of e-mail--for adults as well as teens--is similar to that of a slot machine.
"You have intermittent, variable reinforcement," she explains. "You are not sure you are going to get a reward every time or how often you will, so you keep pulling that handle."

2) The feeling of connectedness

The biggest benefit most people seem to be deriving from Twitter is the ability to feel more connected to others. Carson Systems' Lisa put it this way in a comment to Tara Hunt's defense of Twitter:
"Twittering fills in those gaps...recording our friends’ feelings, geographic location and actions as if we were spookily almost there. That makes us feel *really* connected..."

Is this really a good thing?

Probably, yes. For most people, perhaps. But I think it's worth a critical look as opposed to an automatic connected-is-awlays-implicitly-good response. UCSF neurobiologist Thomas Lewis claims that if we're not careful, we can trick a part of our brain into thinking that we're having a real social interaction--something crucial and ancient for human survival--when we actually aren't. This leads to a stressful (but subconscious) cognitive dissonance, where we're getting some of what the brain thinks it needs, but not enough to fill that whatever-ineffable-thing-is-scientists-still-haven't-completely-nailed-but-might-be-smell. He didn't make this claim about Twitter... I attended his talk at The Conference on World Affairs, and he was addressing e-mail, chat, and even television (brain recognizes it's looking at "people", and feels it must be having a social connection (GOOD), but yet it knows something's missing (BAD).

Dr. Lewis cited a ton of studies which I didn't write down, so you can take this with a grain of salt. Plus, I'm extending his issues from e-mail and chat to Twitter. But part of the reasons he talks about are that our brain has evolved an innate ability to interpret body language, facial expression, tone of voice, etc. so the brain expects these channels of information and becomes distressed when the social interaction appears to be there, but these innate, legacy-brain pieces are missing.

Again, this doesn't mean that it's not worth it and highly valuable for people TO stay connected to far-flung family and friends, I'm just saying that it's worth a look at whether that might be lulling some folks into a false sense of "I'm connected" at the expense of real-life connections.

Coffee with your next-door neighbor could do more for your brain than a thousand Twitter updates.

While this same argument has been going around forever, and is the same claim made about television, that doesn't make it untrue. (There's that study about the isolated Canadian village whose collective IQ went down once cable finally came to the village... Lewis cites it in his talks, although I can't find it referenced online).

Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling of not being connected, by feeding the fear of not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being "constantly updated," it amplifies the feeling of missing something if you're not checking Twitter (or Twittering) with enough frequency.

3) Twitter is the best/worst cause of continuous partial attention

From an earlier post of mine:

Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest... being in flow. Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that's quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.

And not only are we stopping ourselves from ever getting in flow, we're stopping ourselves from ever getting really good at something. From becoming experts. The brain scientists now tell us that becoming an expert is not a matter of being a prodigy, it's a matter of being able to focus.

We're already seeing a backlash response to info overload, and it seems like a good chunk of Web 2.0 VC investments are going to companies that promise to help us get/stay organized. There's a reason 43 Folders is a Top 100 blog, and it's got to be more than just Merlin Mann's good looks ; )

Lots of people are talking about this, and perhaps nobody more eloquently than Linda Stone:

"To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking."

Bottom line(s):

Do I think Twitter has benefits? Clearly, and Tara does a great job of defining them (although not everyone agrees that these things are all benefits, they are for her and that's what matters).

Do I think people can use Twitter responsibly, without letting it get out of control or become too much of a distraction or encourage the same kind of voyeurism that makes tabloid news and TV so pervasively popular in the US?
Yes, definitely.

All I'm saying is that beyond the hype, we should consider just how far down the rabbit hole of always-on-attention we really want to go.

I am not in the target audience for Twitter--I am by nature a loner. I don't want to be that connected. And I also have a huge appreciation for the art of keeping the mystery alive. I don't want to know that much about so many people, and I sure don't want people to know that much about me... mundane or otherwise. So, that puts me in the minority, and my Twitter fears are probably based solely on my own--quirky and less common--personality traits.

Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video...

SXSW Interactive had more attendees than ever before. A lot more. But here's the confusing part: the people attending are the same people who create and evangelize the tools that make attending totally unnecessary. I started my keynote by asking if anyone was live-blogging. Hands shot up across the room. Someone yelled "Twitter!" The whole thing was recorded on video and audio. So... if nobody needed to be there, why were they?

Lots of people claimed it was all about the side/hallway conversations. But chat and Twitter and all the other non-face-to-face tools are pretty damn good at letting you have conversations. Some said it was for the free beer, but seriously, if you needed to come to Austin, pay a few hundred bucks, and stand in lines just to get a beer, you have other issues. The only logical excuse was for those few (or perhaps more) singles who were hoping for some... action. So it must be something illogical, or rather--some ineffable human thing that defies a simple rational explanation.

The point is, face-to-face still matters. And in fact all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y'all are building, we now have more far-flung friends--including people we've never met f2f--than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

All we (and the scientists researching this) know is that there is something we still haven't managed to replicate in a meaningful way, even with the highest-resolution video conferencing tools. One theory is that it has something to do with smell. Whatever it is, it exerts a powerful pull on our legacy brain... a brain that still has no idea we aren't living in caves where human contact and social face-to-face interaction are key to our survival.

The most underrated benefit of the face-to-face effect of conferences is INSPIRATION.

For me, the single biggest reason to attend an event like SXSW is the feeling of motivation and--as David Seah so aptly put it -- "Rededication". Almost everyone I talked with at SXSW said they were newly inspired. Was it from the ideas they were hearing in the sessions? Some of it, sure. But again, those same ideas are going out to everyone with a browser. No, there's more to it. There's mirror neurons, for one thing, and the effect of emotional contagion that happens when you're around a pile of people who share the same interest and enthusiasm. Everyone comes out re-energized. And you don't need to go to SXSW to get that benefit! Simply attending any live event--from the three-person lunch meetup to the 100-person local user group can give you the most positive effect of being at an event like SXSW.

In my talk, I mentioned two implications of the importance of face-to-face:

1) We should encourage our (human) users to get together in the offline world.
2) We should add more human-ness to the interactions in our software.

In this post, I want to mention a few ideas for the first one.

Get your users to meet other users in the real world!
Where there is passion around an activity or product or service or cause, there are always people wanting to connect with others who share that passion. The more we can help put our users together with one another offline, the more likely we are to get--or increase--user passion.

Suggestions:

1) Put together a "How To Start A Local User Group or Club" document.
Include tips on things like finding a space, topic ideas, and getting speakers. (If anyone has one of these, please let us know!)

2) Offer free materials for the user groups
User group meetings often start or end with prize drawings; give the user group leaders plenty of swag for the meetings. It'll make the leaders look good, etc.

3) Treat your user group leaders like royalty
Sun puts JUG (Java User Group) leaders on a pedastal--helping them promote their groups, giving them special receptions at the annual JavaOne conference, etc.

4) Instead of a traditional user group, provide guidelines for a Study Group
(Or a related book club.) Collect advice and lessons from other existing groups. Provide a list of suggested books to read, and 6-months' worth of topic plans. For example, "Month One: read [insert book related to your domain], and have each attendee discuss the following key points..."

5) Hold a very low-cost annual weekend conference.
Make it ridiculously easy for people to get there. Find sponsors to help. Even better if you hold several mini-conferences a year, in different locations.

6) Encourage users to start a local BarCamp (or other *Camp).
Direct your users to the BarCamp Wiki where they can learn how to do it.

7) Use Meetup.com as a resource!

8) If you already have online user forums, enlist moderators to try to form an offline meetup.
This is often one of the best places to start.

9) Hold special cocktail receptions/parties for user group leaders at industry conferences in your domain.

10) Advertise/promote your user group events on your main page!
Remember, passionate users MUST connect with others who share that passion, so this is not a nice-to-have... it's an essential part of any product, service, or cause for which people are passionate.

Bottom line: Face-to-Face matters, and the more people we meet online, the more people we now want to connect with offline. Perhaps one day in the future, the technology will finally catch up with real-life and we'll get the same brain/health benefits from a non-real-world experience. Personally, I hope not. I'd rather see technology that lets us come together in the real world as cheaply and easily as possible, despite wide geographic distances.

And to all who bothered to come to my SXSW talk when you clearly didn't need to, I so SO much appreciate it. I've only recently been speaking at conferences, but I've been attending them for almost 20 years like a junkie. And I don't even go to the parties. I go because I always come back motivated, even by the things I had begun to take for granted.

You don't need to go to SXSW to take advantage of the ideas there... just read the coverage and listen to the podcasts. But to get the real benefit of SXSW without being there, find a local group of people to meet up with! Even if it's three people having a coffee morning, it's important. A lot more important than most of us twittering, IM'ing, blogging, video-chatting folks like to acknowledge.

Searching the CPU Blog Space

As you might guess, I’m a big fan of web search. Disclosure: I work at Google now, but I’ve always felt that being able to effectively search is really a key skill, whether you’re searching in a library or in an online web-based corpus. And we know that being able to provide your users with easy-to-find information is absolutely essential.

A while back, Google introduced something called “Custom Search Engines” (CSE) – it’s basically a way to make a very simple widget that lets users search a particular piece of the web. Since you get to say which piece of the web gets searched, you can focus in on information that’s very targeted to your users.

URL: http://google.com/coop/cse/

Not long after Google launched CSE, I built one for our Creating Passionate Users blog. Just as a mini-experiment, I put the search tool at the bottom of the blog and wondered if anyone would find it and use it. (Sure, go ahead… you can look down there now. It’s really there.)

All it really does is (in my best techno-geek-speak) is a “site restriction operator over the CPU blog space…”

What that really means is that when you do a search using the widget at the bottom of each CPU posting, that search is limited to just the contents of all the CPU postings and the comments.

So if you really want to find that great blog post Kathy wrote about Icelandic horses, or the one about acrobatic dismounts, or maybe the sexy t-shirts post, all you’ve got to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and find the search box. It’ll look like this:

 

Figure 1: Note this is an IMAGE, the real thing is down below…

 

To use it, just type your search terms in the box on the left (where you see the words “Google Custom Search” in light gray). Hit enter, and, voila.. you’ll find the posts you seek.

If you have a website or run your own blog, you might want to consider adding your own Custom Search Engine to it. It’s really pretty simple - it took me about 3 minutes to make our CPU Custom Search Engine, then another 5 minutes to fit it into the Typepad HTML.

As I mentioned, I dropped the search box onto the bottom of our CPU blog posting page. I know, I know… that’s a terrible place to put it if you’re looking for traffic. But I was really curious how many people read all the way to the bottom of the post and would then use the feature.

Here’s the answer:

 

Figure 2: Statistics of the CPU Custom Search Engine. Uses per day since startup.

As you can see, we’re slowly picking up more and more traffic over time. This is a typical adoption curve for a well-hidden feature. It’s been used a little bit each day. Notice how use typically drops on the weekends. Is that because we tend to post midweek, or are all you readers checking out CPU at work??

Now that we have some experience with it, it might be time to move it up to the top of the page.

Consider adding custom search as a way to quickly and easily increase the overall usability of your web site / blog / whatever… Since it’s now pretty easy, you no longer have any excuse for making your users work to find the information they really want about your product.

Just out of curiosity, now that the secret is out, how many of you noticed the search box down there, and never tried it out?  If not, can you say why?   

And if you have tried it out, did it work for you?

Inquiring minds want to know!  We're experimenting just a bit to see if we can't make CPU an ever-better place to learn the latest and greatest.  Tell us what you think!