Deborah Schultz

An Experiment: The psychic impact of our connected lives

During the past week I conducted an experiment in digital empathy.  

Background

As many of you are aware, I am obsessed with the potential of enabling and integrating our digital 1/0 lives into our human emotive sides.  

I don't just want a quantified self,  I want a qualified self.  

Giving me more numbers and graphs and charts can be helpful but providing me with more things to compete over does nothing to enhance my joy and presence with others or provide me with the tactile and unmeasurable benefits from getting a hug or whacking a table with a boomwhacker [as I recently observed when over 200 geeks gleefully demonstrated at YxYY].

We have a long way to go in how we think and design tech to enhance our lives, maybe it's a silly and impossible goal and we shouldn’t even try. However, as someone who loves, lives and breathes tech and believes that the stuff we can’t often measure is where the human spirit lives, I think it is worth a try. 

Situation

Three major events pulling me in a roller coaster of emotion.

Two weeks ago my Facebook feed become ground zero for demonstrating the psychic and emotional schism of our connected lives. My feeds where filling up with comments, conversations and reactions from three very distinct events: 

• YxYY: Enthusiastic preparations by over 400 geeks and creatives as they anticipated the second year of YxYY. As one of  the co-founders of YxYY, my heart swelled as I saw all the amazing projects and enthusiasm about to be unleashed over three days in Palm Springs. I was proud and excited and content.

• At the same time, the turmoil between Israel and Gaza was picking up and my friends and family in Israel were running for cover from rockets raining down on them. As I read each post, my heart sunk. I was angry, sad depressed and frustrated - feeling impotent in how to empathize from so far away with my second home and also filled with the stress and fear, anger and sadness that accompanies living in a state of war. 

• World Cup - a distraction an emotional release with a beginning, middle and end to each match - cathartic and global and physical and fun.  Particularly, because the matches this year demonstrated great sportsmanship between players and the best the sport has to offer the world.  There was even a running joke on the day of the Brazil vs Germany debacle on how ‘Israelis are calling Brazilians to see if they are OK’. 

Post YxYY the turmoil in Israel was a full fledged ground war and for every beautiful photo and post I liked and commented on from new friendships born at YxYY, there was another post on a funeral, someone called up to fight and the moral debates and toll of civilian deaths in Gaza.  My world had gotten very small and very dichotomous.  It was an extreme example and observation of what we all live in the midst of on a constant basis as we each deal with the mini "emotional yeahs and neighs” that fill our digital lives in a constant stream. 

Experiment

So, I did the least logical thing - I decided to jump into the deep end of the pool and I downloaded the Red Alert app.  [Red Alert was created for Israelis to warn them of rocket attacks. You can find plenty of stories about it around the Net].   I wanted to see if I could feel a different sort of empathy - an in the moment sense of what living under rocket threat and war feels like.  Could this app - stripped of the physical boundaries it was created for impact me and how?  For the past week, I have gotten all red alert notifications on my phone.  

Observations

• I was stressed.  At first, it was traumatic - every 30 seconds another notice - my stress level went through the roof even as I sat alone on my couch in San Francisco.  What would it be like if I lived in Ashkelon and had to physically run for my life this often? 

• Would an app like this be helpful to the media in this or other situations? It is always difficult to report on “non-events”  if reporters not in based in Israel had Red Alert would they understand the impact without the ‘death/injury numbers?

• Can we design other apps that enable empathy and catalyze people to action in other ways?

• This experiment was also a cautionary tale. By the end of the week, I started to get a bit numb - with no real impact on my life, the alerts became an annoyance [of course part of this is the design of the app - needs more finesse - even my israeli friends had to turn it off. 

• The app highlighted a need for those from afar to connect to thos e in stress.  I want to be able to connect and reach out to specific friends, people - to engage them during hard times not just empathize alone on my couch

Takeaways

What does all this 'connectedness yet oddly disconnectedness' do to us on a regular basis -  this may be an extreme moment in time for me personally, but we are all constantly managing this state of being - no wonder we often feel stressed and at odds.  This is not simply about ‘Information Overload’ or 'Getting Shit Done' or 'Inbox zero' - it is about the type and nature of the information that flows passed us.

• When news and information are not just an intellectual exercise, how do we handle it?

• Are we psychically wired to deal with so much and such radical shifts in our emotive state?

• How can we build better tools to help us deal with this in positive proactive ways?

• Can we build these tools with a knowledge of not just empathy but action and emotional connection and support?

Ironically, during my experiment, I read that the Yo! app built as a joke [think of it as a global internet based “poke”] that I often made fun of as a sign of social media jumping the shark - is potentially integrating with Red Alert.  Amazing.  The fact that a lightweight joke app designed to ping a friend can integrate with a practical highly functional app like Red Alert so that I can send a supportive note to a friend thousands of miles away in a bomb shelter, is a good sign indeed for the future of our psychic connected selves.

In emergencies my coping mechanism is action, I am a problem solver and a doer and it helps me deal with the emotion - I need to act. This experiment had given me pause to think about an entirely new area of apps - call em - digital empathy catalyzers.  These tools not only enable us to connect but perhaps to feel and act.

I am hopeful.  I have no other choice.

[Note: This post is meant to take a look at emotional dichotomy and its impact on our digital lives, it is not a forum for political discussion.  As I have stated online numerous times, I rarely post about Israel because the situation is complex and I don't think the Net is the best place to have civil dialogue on a complex topic fraught with emotion And yes, I am conscious of the irony of this as it relates to this post]. 

Forging a New Social Contract - the preso

Here is a new concept I have been noodling around with over the past year.  I packaged it into a talk at SXSW with the title: Dear Miss Manners: WTF the Social Web.  In essence, we are living through major shifts in business, culture and politics - this shifting landscape has resulted in a the need to forge new expectations on how we live together as a global community - aka a new social contract.

Forging a New Social Contract - SXSW 2011

View more webinars from deb schultz

Forging a New Social Contract

A lot has been said recently about the utopian vs. distopian aspects of the Social Web. You can't watch a media broadcast, attend a dinner party or pass by a bookstore without someone either praising the benefits of our new hyperconnected relationship economy or bemoaning it as the end of civilization.  

Frankly, I have become more than a bit bored by the binary nature of these conversations and commentary.  Technology isnt good or bad - what we do with it and how we adopt and integrate it into our lives is the challenge.  The Social Web is a mere teenager and although many of us may have grown up on the Internet, the Internet is by no means all grown up.

I am looking forward to sharing some of my thoughts and catalyzing a hearty discussion on this topic at SXSW this week.  Here is the description of my talk - all snarky and fun for the SXSW zeitgeist.  In truth this is less about actual etiquette than about discussing the implications of living in world with emergent socio-normative behaviors. I promise to post my slides and reactions after the show.

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Dear Miss Manners: The Social Web, WTF?

The Social Web is now a teenager –awkward, arrogant, snarky, fearless, experimental and open. She is shaking things up and having a major impact on our culture, social dynamics, and etiquette. What are the new social dynamics and cultural impacts of all these tools and technologies? This session will explore the emerging etiquette issues of our participatory hyper-connected world. What are the new rules? How are our relationships, culture and business assumptions changing? Do we understand the impact of this new relationship persistence?

• Do I have to ask before I post a photo of a friend online? Who has editorial approval?
• Am I required to respond to every inbound communication I receive or is “ignoring” an accepted response?
• Where is the line between encouraging participation and being just plain annoying?
• What are you doing mucking up my activity stream?
• What the heck is a “friend” anyway?

How do we design, build and manage these new spaces? What are the new rules of the online commons and the associated appropriate etiquette? This participatory session will ask attendees to contribute their own real world examples and will lay out a new framework for a new social contract. It’s our job to decide what we want our web teenager to be when she is all grown-up.

If you are attending SXSW please stop in and participate and view the preso here.

 

People of the Link - a fun comparative look at the social web

Here is a fun talk I have  given at IgniteSF and at Nokia Ideascamp on the connection between Jewish Culture and the Social Web.  This only skims the surface of all the similarities but it is a fun start.  Once I started down the path I kept finding more and more connections that made sense.  

Basically - if you want to understand how our society and business worlds need to adapt to a networked, emergent, decentralized world take a look at how Jewish culture has survived in Diaspora for 5771 years. There is a real framework for co-creation, crowdsourcing, participation, attribution [aka Creative Commons] etc.  We get this stuff.  [Note: I am sure that other decentralized cultures and/or religions may share similarities as well - but this is the one I am an expert in].  The entire construct of the Tummelvision podcast that I host with Heather Gold and Kevin Marks comes from this deep understanding that learning and innovating in a meshed world requires art and science. Balancing enough structure with organic emergence and enabling people to provide the connective tissue is how it all works - kinda like Judaism.  Enjoy.

Note - More on this topic posted sporadically over at PeopleoftheLink

People of the Link from deb schultz

Note: no text notes but hopefully you get the gist of it.

Life isn't binary, neither is the Social Web

In the past few weeks as the economy has tanked, startups, VC's and pundits galore have taken a new look on what this means for the almighty ad dollar and the world of social media. None of this is new - it seems we live in a a cycle of pushing off these questions until we hit tough times. In a lot of ways it reads like a familiar scripted B-movie voice over.

"Can successful startups like Twitter and Facebook figure out a "real" business model? ; Will users put up with more and more ads inserted in the middle of their personal interactions? ; Will all this new data compromise individual privacy?: Will big advertisers flee back to old tried and true models in the face of economic uncertainty? Tune in next week to find out if advertisers will figure this out before struggling startups are forced to close their doors"

It sounds bleak, I know, but I actually have faith that we will weather this current storm and it will even be a forcing function for innovation in the industry. What is however troubling to me is that what is often lost in the above voice overs is the voice of the actual customer and what makes relevant sense.

So, when this Adage article with the provocative title "P&G Digital Guru Not Sure Marketers Belong on Facebook" hit the feeds, I got inundated with emails from a lot of folks asking me "what the heck does this article mean"? Given my current work with P&G [I am their advisor on all things social & emerging media], I am not surprised at being asked this question. What was more interesting was that there were two very different types of emails that took two very divergent views 1) business oriented-"what does this mean for advertising on the internet?" and 2) individualistic and purist-looking at the issue from the lens that says "big companies don't belong on my social network". Well, what it means to me is that we are at a pivotal change in how companies and customer's connect and we are still learning the new rules of the road. These issues are not black and white, all or nothing. I think Battelle summed it up rationally when he states that the social networks/social media and marketing can go together - the question is when and how.

A metaphor that we have used inside P&G is that "if you are invited to a dinner party and you show up and start selling Tupperware, there is a good chance you will not be invited back". In other words, you need to demonstrate value before you jump in and start yelling "buy me". Understanding how and when someone is interested in hearing from you inside a social network is radically different than when shouting across the airwaves with a 30 second spot. Ted demonstrates why I enjoy working with him and P&G - the consumer is always first. The mechanisms on the social web are different and we all still have a lot to learn. Smart companies  - be they big or small -  know that looking at the current version of the web with an old media lens ain't gonna fly. That is why I believe so strongly in the core principles I am working on both with P&G and the Doc Searls and the gang on Project VRM [Sean, Chris, Adriana and more] . Understanding that the user/consumer is in control is a foundation on which any business, ad or marketplace models will operate in the future.

This is the participatory web and the old media models are being shredded. The social web is my web - it's PERSONAL to me. I am not creating media when I am online so much as I am connecting with people using media as my medium. As today's "consumers", we lean forward, we skip ads, we have a strong point of view on products and services and we expect to be heard or left alone on our own terms. The social web can actually provide much deeper and more interesting connections for customers and companies than simply being a marketing channel - it ties into the entire product lifecycle. And that is where stuff gets really interesting...and much more complex. This is where relevance and context and trust and intention all come into play.

In a world where relationship and connection are at once more subtle and scalable than ever before the answer to the question of whether companies & social media can mix is not simply a Yes or No answer. Shame on Adage for oversimplifying this complex ecosystem in the hunt for business relevance. Both Facebook and P&G are working to figure what works for their users and their consumers. In the end it is respecting the individual and the consumer that is most important and I would hope we would take our time to innovate & figure out what works for the long haul and not jump to oversimplified "banner ad, yes or no" solutions.

The social web - just like life - is just not that binary.

Snackbyte: How will it all play out?

As we gather our nuts and prepare for the long hard economic winter ahead, there will be an inevitable consolidation of companies, communities and customers.  I wonder down which path this slowdown will lead us?

This being conference season, I have had a number of interesting conversations with analysts, advertisers, investor's, publishers and start-ups.  The topic of the economy, globalization etcetera -  is of course top of mind.  Opinions vary on how this will all play out, what we can all pretty much agree on is that the social web has now entered adolescence.  This is a fragile time for a teenager - she is highly susceptible to influences - both good and bad.  Will she be dazzled by bling and a quick buck? Will she broaden her horizons via exposure to new ideas and people? [I will drop the metaphor before I beat the life out of it, but you get the idea]

In our enthusiasm over the potential of the social web, our rush to generate viable business models and find customers wherever they may be lurking - what forces will have the greatest long term impact on our social web?  Will we forget the fundamental human drives that gave birth to the social web to begin with? Will companies sell out their customer base for an advertising dollar? Will innovation be spurred by the need for creative re-invention or will it come to a grinding halt? During the great depression - the entertainment industry was a much needed escape from the daily grind [see Sullivan's Travels and rent it NOW if you've never seen it].  If we can look past current mass media models - we may have a real opportunity to create some amazing and viable participatory fun with all these great tools.

I am no macro-economist, but if we can self-organize  - what is the role of the multi-national? Can smaller economic trends mediate the big picture?   The participatory web will have a huge impact on shaping our economic and social future.   It is the next few years that are a big question mark. 

What forces will have the greatest influence on our teenage social web as she grows into adulthood? Will tough economic times - shape a more robust future? Or will she crumble under the pressure?

So - now that I got that out of my system  - what do you think? Did I lose you? Am I nuts?

Cocktails, cupcakes and food for thought..

A quick note to say thanks to Brady, Bre et al - for another great Ignite event.  Cupcakes were gorgeous and the talks were a blast.  I even got to express four years of "alley vs valley" in a compact 5 minutes!

Thanks to Sean, Sam, Jeff, Howard and Sarah for the inspiration!

NYC Tidbit: The classy theatre venue for last nite was a favorite haunt well over 10 years - it was a second run moving theatre [pre netflix, itunes].  You youngins may ask what the heck is a second run movie theatre? Back in the day movies that had been out for a few months would disappear into blockbuster oblivion.  Worldwide Cinemas would screen them - ticket price $2.  Of course the economics didn't hold out so alas they went belly-up.  Good times.

Here the chat.  Hugh graciously created a cartoon for me that alas -  did not make in time for last nite's preso so I used it here:

Alleyvvalley2

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

I also want to give a shout out to Daphne & Bill & the ExpoTV staff for hosting the first ever P&G Social Media lab cocktails prior to the event.  We had a great crowd, great food ,great conversation and even a few games of pool.  I particularly enjoyed getting to introduce partners to each other and getting feedback on how we can make the program even better.  I am hoping to make this semi-regular kind of event.  There is nothing like face to face for making connections.  I particulrly am going to explore how to make these events broader without losing the intimacy and ability to really chat.

A great view on the motivations of the social web

I am a huge fan of Michael Wesch ["the machine is us"].  This video of a talk he gave in front of the Library of Congress is worth the time [yes, 55minutes]..enjoy!

Thanks to Michael Cayley for the link!

Test vs Scale - herein lies the rub

While working with P&G to develop the Social Media Lab, I am constantly wrestling with the  BIG and SMALL issues relating to how the Social Web impacts business, marketing, start-up business models and our lives as individuals. When there is a  new set of dynamics that fundamentally shifts how you communicate and do business - how do you ensure that the smaller tests you are doing have BIG learnings that can be reapplied.

So it was interesting to trip onto this thoughtful post from Francois Goussieaux on the nature of how big companies are approaching Social Media. 

There are very few social media marketing programs that scale to the point where they can truly be useful to multi-billion dollar companies. But why is that?

Part of the problem, as I have described before, is self-inflicted. Many CMO’s know they need to dabble in the space, but that is all they do - run small pilot programs that don’t make a difference. The problem with this approach is that the dynamics of small scale social media programs are very different from large scale social media campaigns. So what may work in large programs will not work in pilot programs and the lessons learned from pilot programs may not be applicable to large scale implementations.

This argument sits squarely in the Social Media Lab's backyard.  Knowing that big companies do indeed have trouble making big changes all at once - the goal of the Lab is to help with baby steps - so the big programs can truly shine.

I also personally believe that there is no such thing as a social media campaign.  Social Media is forcing a fundamental switch in the power center of business and how information, markets and products are created and brought to market.  Whether you are a P&G brand or a start-up - the social web impacts how you connect with customers.  This is not only about social ads or viral videos.  And I sure as heck hope we can come up with better business models for Web2.0 companies than some newer form of banner ad.

That said, how do you run before you can walk?

As I wrestle with the issues of  innovation,  scalability, customer advocacy and new business models here is a sample of some of the questions currently rattling around in my brain:

• What is the best method for generating true innovation and new business models?
• What is the best way to test & learn smartly and efficiently?
• How do you best build bridges of learning across very different cultural groups - i.e. brands and startups?
• How do you best eliminate the fear of failure to encourage bold creative initiatives?
• When does connecting with the consumer cross the line to icky behavioral targeting vs helpful discovery?
• When are you enabling passionate fans vs exploiting them?
• How do you ensure that neither big business or small start-up leaves the customer in the dust in a rush to the shiny new thing?
• Do test programs help in developing innovative approaches to business or are they simply dabbling? [this applies to start-ups and big business]
• As Social Media is all about relationships and connections - can it even scale authentically to support a billion dollar business [see peter's post for more]?
  

I've got lots of questions and some hypothesis grounded in "ya gotta start somewhere", but I am also impatient, so what do you think?   How would you generate a big shift? 

Snackbyte: It's all personal

In preparing for my upcoming "Death of the Grand Gesture" talk at Web2Expo, I've been deep in my usual observational analysis of the dynamics impacting the social web meets "big bidness".  I've also realized [thanks to Mario] that my blogging has become a sad chain of "weekly links".   

I have always found it difficult to juggle "big thoughts", getting stuff done and ensuring I make the time for posting my observational nuggets as they occur to me.  I admit it, I  enjoy real world back and forth conversations more than the more solitary skill of writing [probably why I will never write the great American novel]. 

Which leads me to my recent personal observation. Gasp - I have lost touch with why I fell in love with blogging in the first place - a blog post does not have to be a fully formed argument or a perfect pearl of wisdom - it just has to be.

So in the spirit of it spontaneity I am rededicated to providing both in the future.  I won't promise a schedule or a minimum number of posts or even where they will be posted [she hints at future news], but I do promise to not sit on the nuggets and personal observations till they are all well crafted and wrapped in a bow.   

Today's nugget:   

No matter how you slice it - everything is personal.  Not personal as in taking things personally [tho there is plenty of that taking place], but personal as in this is 'personal to me'.  Social web tools are just that social and personal. They are a reflection of their creator - without a personal voice and tone there is no "there there".  And they are changing the dynamics of how we interact, relate and do business.

The challenge for a business or political campaign is how do you infuse the personal without over-sharing and how do you find the balance of what is appropriate? 

Navigating this landscape of "personal" is tricky 'bidness'  - some words to keep in mind - respect, context, and empathy.

If you want to attend Web2Expo you can use my "personal" discount code: webny08mc23 for $100 off registration fee.  Hope to see you there!