Question 142 of 365: Who controls the power of suggestion?

My children have trigger words. Certain phrases cannot be said in their presence. If these words are uttered within earshot, the response is so immediate and severe that you will wonder if there will ever be another state of mind for them. These are words like “ice cream” or “science show” (also known as Mythbusters). These words are so highly suggestive to my children that they find themselves repeating the words over and over until I have no choice but to act. I either have to give in to what was already suggested or explain, in detail, why the suggestion was merely a mistake and that it is not an appropriate time.

I have trigger words too. Mine are usually overheard from across e room or at a dinner party. If I hear those words, I immediately gravitate toward whomever has said them. Among them are WordPress, iPad, Moodle, wikis, Vonnegut, and Schools. I will drop whatever I am doing to make myself available for those conversations just by virtue of them being suggested. And just like my kids, I am wrong about their suggestions much of the time. Often I mistake people talking about schools in the abstract as something to engage people in a debate about the future of education. They tend to be more interested in talking about a few of the teachers their children have had throughout the years. I often confuse the interest gadgets like the iPad as wanting to have conversations about what is possible to do with them. Too many times people are just talking about how it is just a big iPhone or about something they heard on the news about them.

The power of suggestion is quite strong with me. I can be convinced to engage in almost anything so long as it has one of my keywords somewhere in it. Kind of unfortunate for me, but incredibly fortunate for anyone who is trying to get my attention.

While I cannot extrapolate that all people are this highly suggestive, I would say that from the experience with my children that we never really get over the few things that cause great want within us. We will always be triggered to buy, converse about, or simply lust after the ideas that we connect to the most.

And therefore we are highly controllable. To any great extent if others (or if a service) figures out what our keywords are (or if we simply hand them over in the case of a profile page), we will be manipulated into focusing out attention on only those things that we have professed our affinity for.

That is why the future of advertising scares me a little bit. Anyone that can access our desires, interests, and social connections will be able to serve up the perfect ad that contextualizes a product within the conversation that we would like to have. They will be able to lay out a path to engage with the next idea in the sequence they have developed to get us to purchase their service.

In the ever expanding world of “things that we like”, patterns will likely emerge. It is my belief that web pages and even books will be written for us based upon our interests and searching patterns. Rather than trying to find static pages with a few comments, when we search, the service will look at our complete profile and then compose an article with all of the information we are looking for, with carefully placed product placement in the text itself. The next generation of search will be “find and buy.”

These pages that will be written just for me will be composed into a book that I carry around with me, a reference library for all of the answers that have been created just for me. And because no one will be looking at the exact same pages, each individual version of the answer will be shareable and “likable” which will further lead to the web knowing more about how to better cater to your needs.

Our social interaction around machine created content will be in discussing the products and ideas that have been produced specifically for the purpose of that interaction. And why not? We will be getting better answers, more specific results, and we will only have to read it from our own perspective. We could even choose to see the Internet from other’s viewpoints as a change of pace, just so long as we keep “liking” and sharing along the way.

The power of suggestion will be controlled by those that understand our trigger words best, just as they always have. I use “ice cream” with my children, sometimes as a reward and many times just to see their smiling faces. They love me for both, just as we will love those who share the world’s knowledge with us and give us carrot at the end for us to purchase. I’m not angry about this future. After all, they will be talking about all of the stuff that I already know and love.

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Question 94 of 365: Should we buy and sell our screen real estate?

My wife and I sold our first house this weekend.

It was the place that both of our children started their lives. It was the first place that we could truly call our own. And, it now belongs to someone else. It is theirs to experience and tell stories about. It is theirs to raise their kids and try not to kill the grass in. And I am happy about the whole process.

However, signing those final papers and seeing the check get deposited in our bank account made it all so surreal. It also brought home the idea that it isn’t something that happens every day. I had never before sold a piece of earth to another human being and I don’t anticipate doing it again for a long time. But, the feeling was so nice and so other worldly that it made me want to think about space in a whole different way.

I owned that piece of land, that space, for a period of time. And with a few notable exceptions (doing illegal things within it), I could do whatever I wanted to with it. While I own many objects, a house is the only space that I have ever owned (although, I guess you could argue a car is a moving space I own, but let’s not get too semantic). And then I started thinking about the spaces that I own online. While I am a huge advocate for the cloud, I don’t think that I can make the case that I really own much of what is up on the internet with my name on it. If all of the hosting services I pay for and Google (which, I mostly don’t) went under, I would be left with nothing. So, I went after a more literal definition of space that I can own.

I own my screens.

I own the displays in my devices that let me interact with all of the data that exists in the same way that I own my house that lets me interact with the other people in my family. Our family owns couple televisions, a couple computers, some cell phones, and an iPod or two. This screen real estate is owned outright. And while, I never had thought about it this way until I sold my first house, what if I were to sell part of that screen to someone else?

What if I wanted to sell 1/10th of my laptop screen to an advertising firm? What if I wanted to lease 1/4th of my TV to my favorite entertainment company? What if I wanted to create a commodified market for screen real estate, where users could actually set the price of their own screens depending on their willingness to click on products and services and the percentage of their screens they wanted to part with.

It seems to me that the companies and advertisers have it exactly backwards. They are dealing with a middleman, a reseller of real estate. They are buying ads from Google or from a television network, when they could be buying it directly from the users. They could be working directly with the customers who will be the ones actually buying their product rather than working with a company who will not. I get that Google is the one distributing the ads, but I don’t think we need a distribution service at all if I am accepting the responsibility for selling off 20% of my screen. I am no longer a passive part of the contract with content providers and marketers. I am no longer trying to fast forward through commercials because I have selected the ones that I want to see. If I have leased my screen, then I must sit through the ads that companies want to push.

And I am now choosing what to be sold. I can choose only technology advertising, or food, or local. If companies really want to get smart, they will stop talking to mobile and location-based ad gurus. They will start talking to users about just what kinds of things they would be interested in selling their screen for.

For example, I would sell 1/10th of my computer screen to a running banner of local deals on food, new technology products, and books and periodicals. I would love to be pushed that information in exchange for a few hundred dollars a year. I would be a more informed consumer and I would be able to afford more of those want-based (rather than need-based) purchases.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it seems as though many people don’t think that I own my screen enough to sell directly to me. They think that they have to go through a different company that provides the software or the web-service to reach me. It is almost as if Google is putting up billboards on my front lawn and then selling other people the opportunity of putting up ads. But, if they would have just asked me in the first place, I would put up signs for them, so long as they give me a good deal on landscaping or driveway sealing.

Let’s cut out the middleman. Let’s establish a marketplace for screen real estate. Realtors optional.

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Question 12 of 365: Which words cause us to act?

Action is a relative term.

Is action the clicking of a button on a webpage? Is action the filling out of a form? Is action telling a friend or coworker about an idea? Is action standing outside holding up a sign, or waiting in a line? Or is action simply taking an interest where apathy and doing nothing is the alternative.

There is a science to persuasion, to getting others to do what it is that you would like. We see this every day in the decisions we make to advertise for ourselves, for our ideas, and for our products. Whether we like to admit it or not, each blogger or YouTuber or teacher or entrepreneur is trying to convince anyone who will listen to pay attention for one minute more. We are trying to convince someone to care about what it is that we are saying. We are trying to get someone else to act engaged or act like they want what we have to offer, whether they really do or not.

So, if that is what I am doing, which words are the ones that cause that action as much of the time as possible? People are turned off by simple commands. Look here or Click this have their place, but it isn’t a substitute for actual engagement. At the end of the day, I want actions that are authentic. I want people to want to build something with me.

I guess the words must be authentic too.

If I am asking for others to respond with genuine interest, I had better be genuinely interested in the problems that they are having. I had better find a way to express the feelings that they would express themselves if they had only typed the blog post with their own fingers. And, I guess I better have a solution too. The solution is what will cause someone really to turn from a passive viewer to an active participant. I must solve the thing that has been eating away at someone for too long. I must resolve the issue that has plagued someone, create peace within a tortured experience.

So, I will. I will put the solution into words. I will make the pitch that allows someone else to take part. And, I hope to do this without telling lies or trying to be something that I am not. I hope to do this without selling out or selling air. I hope to solve problems by starting with my own.

I guess other people might have the same problems too.

Truth in advertising…

I have had quite a few people follow me on twitter recently that weren’t exactly people. They were organizations and schools. They were large groups of people that all somehow are tweeting with the same account. This, is a little unsettling to me and I’m not sure why.
 
I guess it is partially because I believe it is a little less than genuine to have a single voice represent an entire entity. I also believe that many groups are joining twitter simply to advertise that they are on twitter. This is even less genuine.
 
To me, an organization should encourage all of it’s members to become a part of a learning network. It should ask all of it’s employees to have heir own voices and then stream them all into a single place. The school should aggregate the conversation about learning in their space, not merely give updates as to the merits of their latest program changes.
 
You raise the level or discourse about any topic by giving that discourse an official channel. By asking all participants in an organization to tweet on behalf of that organization, you can actually find the pulse of what is going on. Which is, after all, the major goal of Twitter.
 
Sent from my iPod

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