Simplicity, Elegance, and EXPLOSIONS (or other attention-getting things) (3.15.11)

                 Heath and Heath do a nice job of laying the groundwork for understanding and generating “sticky” ideas in Made to Stick. The first step to success (or SUCCESS, as they use it) is seemingly straightforward:  keep it simple. Of course, keeping something simple is ironically complicated (thus the entire chapter devoted to it in H&H’s book). Simplicity, when it comes to making a concept stick, is all about finding the core - finding the single idea at the very heart of the matter (27) – and then “making it compact” (46). One of the examples the authors offer is Southwest Airlines’ motto and goal, at least as far as its employees are concerned:  Southwest wants to be “THE low-fare airline.” This extremely compact statement packs a punch when one actually considers what being THE low-fare airline actually means and how it affects corporate/employee decision-making. Absolutely everything that this company does should allow it and/or enable it to be the airline with the lowest prices. This doesn’t mean that pilots, technicians, and stewards can begin ignoring safety to reduce labor and time costs. Maintaining safety standards is part of being an airline, period. However, when making daily decisions about how the airline should function as a business (i.e. what kind of extra services customers receive, the kind of freedom staff members can enjoy in performing their duties, etc.), employees of Southwest can recall their motto and adjust their behaviors and choices accordingly.

However, Heath and Heath do draw an important distinction between simplicity and oversimplification. According to our authors, simplicity is “elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down” (30), meaning that the simple ideas we use have to be useful for our purposes. They need to be core concepts, they need to be compacted down, and they need to be effective. Heath and Heath suggest that a simple but effective idea will generate complexity over time. Like Southwest’s motto, a simple statement can have a wide-ranging impact and hold implications for a variety of scenarios. In fact, Southwest’s employee motto is an entire paradigm packed into four words. The idea contained by those four words is straightforward, but it defines exactly what Southwest is as a company, as an airline, as a service provider, etc.

Of course, a part of keeping things simple is not letting things become overly complicated. It’s a painfully obvious concept, but one which H&H find valuable. Believe it or not, explaining something simply is not always intuitive. This is why schema, or “a collection of generic properties of a concept or category” (54), prove hugely important. The example offered in Made to Stick is the pomelo. The pomelo is basically a grapefruit with a few distinctive characteristics of its own. The grapefruit is essentially a schema which makes describing a pomelo much more effective. According to Heath and Heath, “schemas enable profound simplicity” (55) because they allow the audience or the receiver of an idea to bring what they already know to the table. When Twitter hit the internet the Facebook status schema was used to describe it. This made a brand new social networking tool not only easy to understand, but also easy to use immediately. People came to Twitter with a lot of Facebook experience, experience which bridged a knowledge gap which might have otherwise slowed Twitter’s growth and rise in popularity.

Ultimately, ignoring what a person already knows or finds familiar leads to over-complication – or perhaps just ineffectual communication. Imagine trying to describe Twitter to a new user without a schema to put it into context. It would be a nightmare. This is not to say that Twitter is Facebook. Its creators, I’m sure, would strongly deny and rebuke any such claim. Still, Facebook is a useful comparison, one which is not worth overlooking. Now, I may want to describe a citrus fruit (or social network) very specifically and, as a result, choose to rely simply on that fruit’s characteristics to paint the most accurate picture possible for my audience. However, if the audience still can’t see the picture I’m painting all of my work is wasted. This is what I mean about intuition. I think it’s possible that, in an attempt to be precise, we intuitively avoid schema when communicating our ideas. However, schema can give an audience immediate access to a concept, and they can provide a foundation upon which greater accuracy and more complexity might be built. In other words, employing schema can make ideas stick in precisely the ways H&H suggest:  by making ideas simple and effective.

                For those of us that are still concerned simplicity is too close to over-simplification, Heath and Heath have a tip:  make your ideas unexpected. Ideas can be simple but still create surprise, and it is these kinds of ideas that gain and maintain a person’s attention. Interestingly enough, we still get to employ schema when making our ideas unexpected. This time, however, we are undermining schema to create surprise and then lasting interest. As H&H describe this process, we make ideas more interesting if we break and then fix a person’s “guessing machine.” This extends beyond employing gimmicks, not that gimmicks aren’t useful. What manipulating a person’s guessing machine really means is showing that person something counterintuitive and then offering an explanation. The second half of this process is particularly important because, without context and the knowledge to make an idea make sense, people will stop caring (or, at best, become extremely frustrated). According to H&H, using surprise or mystery relies on the gap-theory of curiosity. People are not only naturally curious, but they are also naturally annoyed by confusion and knowledge gaps. This means that, when people have their guessing machine broken (when our expectations are undermined), they are willing to stick around to see it fixed and to experience the catharsis that come along with that. I can’t count how many (often dumb) YouTube videos I have sat through because something in the caption or title (or the absurd number of views) made me curious, challenged my expectations, and pushed me to care enough to complete the video. I find videos with titles like, “How did she do that?!” or “How did he survive this?!” particularly effective. These questions make me curious and make me care. It’s worth noting that these are clearly gimmicks, but the same concept applies:  simple ideas stick, but they stick better if they’re not boring.

Give us SIGNIFICANCE (3.8.11)

It turns out I anticipated the move Dr. Howard would be making in the “Significance” chapter of his book in my February 22^nd post, which investigated the concept of belonging in the success of online communities or social networks. I guess I’m a genius. Or, perhaps, this is simply a reflection of how closely related the two concepts are. Either way, it sounds like an idea worth some dedicated time and blog-space.

So, what does it mean for an online community to have significance?

According to Dr. Howard, significance is about generating a “network or community’s gravitas, brand, and reputation” (168), which is to say that significance is about attracting people for reasons that extend beyond remuneration. This is how what Dr. Howard calls “the paradox of exclusivity” applies to significance:  people will value a community more if they are one of an elite group of members. That doesn’t mean that the community is unpopular, simply that it is hard to gain membership. That makes the members feel better about being members and makes community membership much more attractive and desirable to people on the outside. Dr. Howard calls this a paradox because it tends to be a community designer’s first instinct, and most obvious desire, to attract the multitudes. It is a tricky numbers game, to be sure, but exclusivity can lend a community significance and, as I suggested before, make members feel a deeper sense of belonging. In other words, tricky or not, it’s worth it. And it works. Barak Obama’s online community designers engineered his online campaign around a certain level of exclusivity. Members gained desirable information early, making that information proprietary and those members privileged. And now he’s president.

Facebook did something similar in is earliest manifestations. Only students from a select number of universities could have a Facebook profile. There weren’t, as a result, the multitude of members then that there are today. However, there were quality members, and the multitudes noticed and wanted in – and that’s serious significance. Dr. Howard calls the “quality” side of membership “social capital” (171). Communities that can generate the right kind of social capital can make their communities more significant to members and non-members alike. Like Facebook, once the network or community is popular enough, its managers can choose to open the doors to a less specific (and perhaps less elite) crowd. Facebook is amongst the most successful social networks ever created because of that initial exclusivity and resulting significance. Had its makers opened it up initially to any and every one, chances are that a few students from hundreds of schools might have made profiles. Instead, Facebook remained restricted and got the attention of every student from every university in the country and much of the world. Like I said, it’s a tricky numbers game, but numbers Facebook’s are pretty convincing.

Once you’ve decided what kind of crowd you want to acquire for your community, Dr. Howard notes that the next step is to determine how you should attract them. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Tipping Pointi, provides three different types of conversation starters that community / network builders should be on the lookout for if they want the word to really spread:

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           - Connectors:  people who have an abnormally large number of connections

-               - Mavens:  experts in a particular subject (specifically experts who enjoy talking about that subject)

-               - Salesmen:  people who sell ideas (big surprise); people who spread information and convince others to act on that      information

These individuals, collectively known as the “nodes” of a given network or, more generally, “influentials,” are the initial target for community builders. Dr. Howard explains that there are a variety of ways to contact these people – by invitation or by offering an open-access community – and a number of ways to keep those people interested. This means that you need “influentials” to lend your community or network significance, but you also need to make the “influentials’” experiences significant as well. Dr. Howard offers a variety of suggestions from acknowledging members’ accomplishments to celebrating celebrities to offering members a story which translates a shared vision (I won’t list them all here to avoid redundancy).

The point is, what we create should be quality; it should deserve quality membership and positive attention. It is worth the effort to find the people who can connect you to the community you want to attract. In other words, when we design communities we have to do it with a specific set of community members in mind. And that community can’t be “everyone.” If we don’t go into a design project deliberately with our own set of very specific goals in terms of membership, then chances are people won’t deliberately seek out our community and scrabble for that membership once it becomes available on the web.

Believe it. Feel it. (3.1.11)

                Heath and Heath spend two chapters investigating how credibility and appeals to emotion can, to use their terminology, make stuff “stick.” I enjoyed this read quite a bit, and I think it has more than a little to do with our authors’ tendency to tell stories which reveal principles rather than explain principles and offer examples. As I was reading I realized that I felt really engaged by their story-telling and was, as a result, more convinced by their arguments. In a way, my realization relates to the main idea of the week’s reading. That is, my experience with Made to Stick can be explained to some extent by what the book intends to illustrate. There is a real, identifiable logic to the things that Heath and Heath assert, and the best part is I identify the logic in the examples myself. If anything can make an idea “stick,” it’s making that idea come from me, not imposing that idea on me (no matter how valid that idea / your evidence might be). In this week’s reading, the Heath brother’s focus on relating an idea to people – or, more specifically, connecting people with an idea – such that believing / buying into / behaving in response to / accepting that idea is intuitive. This is precisely what I noticed their book achieving with myself, and this is what they discuss in terms of two basic but important “stickiness” concepts:  credibility and emotion.

                If we get to the core of the question Heath and Heath are asking (Why do some ideas “stick” and how can I make it happen again?), we are inevitably going to run into questions of credibility. Making an idea credible is an extremely powerful and effective way of also making that idea intuitive to a person (or, to use a different vocabulary, to make that idea marketable). Traditional sources of credibility, which is not to say out –of-date sources of credibility, include statistics and spokespersons (what our authors call “external validation”). These are, if you will, the oldest tricks in the book, but they appeal to people because they are concrete and because they create and/or validate a person’s given set of expectations. Essentially, statistics and spokespersons paint a particular picture of the world – one made to look very real – and offer specific perspectives. However, the authors note that the more detailed you make that painting, the easier it is for people to see. Though they don’t say this explicitly, Heath and Heath seem to be strongly suggesting that personal experience and personal engagement – audience participation if you will – are necessary for the spread of ideas. What they discover is that when people see, they also internalize; when people internalize, they arrive at an idea and believe it. The same is true for their other credibility tactics, including the antiauthority and the Sinatra Test.

                Heath and Heath immediately follow their discussion about credibility with a chapter about emotion. This makes sense. Credibility is related, to some extent anyway, to emotions (i.e. trust, conviction, hope, etc.), so there is decent logic in the order of their chapters already. However, credibility also relies on logic. What our authors know, I’m sure, is that not everyone is logical. What they (and you) can count on is that everyone has emotions (and that those emotions can be exploited!). What Heath and Heath lay out, though, proves much more complex than basic appeals to personal happiness. Self-interest, as their many examples illustrate, is a powerful tool. Nonetheless, people also respond to things which acknowledge their unique identities and their unique goals. Floyd Lee, for example, does his job well not because he will get a raise but rather because he sees his occupation as important, as something which transcends the confines of its basic operations (in his case, the mess hall). Most importantly, ironically enough, is not appealing to any particular emotion but helping people simply be emotional. Most people will empathize if given the right opportunity. What Heath and Heath suggest is that making people think analytically – such as presenting them with the number of people starving in a given region in Africa – will make them forget to become emotional about information. If data is presented in a way that makes people identify with it and see it as more than data, then chances are they will have some kind of emotional response. Once again, when people can internalize an idea – when they can understand it personally or compare it to first-hand experience – it suddenly becomes much more potent.

                I’ll offer a brief example that affirms what Heath and Heath seem to be getting at. I’ll point out immediately that my example is imperfect – it does not relate specifically to online communities, nor is it a direct application of the Sinatra Test. But it’s close enough...

                I shop for deals on hiking and other outdoor gear frequently. Shopping for deals, of course, means also shopping for the best value. The market for this type of merchandise is massive and, as a result, I find myself reading reviews of products, exploring backpacking blogs, and researching new innovations in equipment all of the time, attempting to be as scrutinizing and thrifty as possible (this type of merchandise is also, as it turns out, ridiculously expensive). In my reading I came across Patagonia’s Field Reports. Patagonia is already renowned for its eco-friendly, socially responsible manufacturing processes as well as for its extremely high quality products. With all of these wonderful things, however, comes a higher price tag. This is what made its Field Reports so smart. Patagonia sends out writers and general adventure-seekers on long exotic trips with its products. These reporters write about their experiences and include surprisingly little about the Patagonia stuff they used. The point is this:  Patagonia is making itself appear credible (essentially practicing what it preaches, or more accurately, relying on what it sells) by illustrating proving to what extremes its products can be taken. It is, in a way, a self-imposed Sinatra Test. If people interested in Patagonia products are curious as to whether or not its gear will hold up in this or that condition, climate, etc, then Patagonia is willing to find out. At the same time Patagonia is also appealing to people’s sense of identity, employing reporters who can write entertaining, exhilarating stories (which, by the by, are another “sticky” tactic) and who are also really cool people. It might sound trite, but individuals who consider themselves “fairly outdoorsy” have a lot of respect for people who are clearly “ridiculously outdoorsy.” These aren’t customers on Amazon that are taking their kids and/or dog on a two hour hike. These are adventure professionals. Plus, Patagonia avoids barraging its customers with numbers and facts and company policies. It lets the products do all of the talking. That’s really the bottom line:  when someone thinks about buying a Patagonia jacket or backpack but aren’t sure they are willing to spend the extra cash which ensures that the quality will be high and that good labor conditions are met in a Chinese factory, maybe they will be willing to pay to be the type of person that uses those products. Of course, other brands do this, but that is well beyond the point. Patagonia, or whatever other company you like, does it to appear credible and to appeal to the emotional predispositions of its customers. And seeing as I still can’t afford Patagonia’s many wonderful products, it seems to be working.