If you'd like to understand a little about me, this may help - a little.
I've created this site as a place to store some background work that might help to clarify my interests. At this point, it's an experiment. Thanks for stopping by.
My Other Accounts
Fantasy Becomes Faith
What do the following statements have in common:
- Trump supporters are fascists.
- Trump supporters are white supremacists.
- Democrats are socialists.
- Democrats want open borders.
Answer: they are all widely held beliefs. They are also false.
But, they are not 100 percent false. It's hard to say precisely how false they are. Doubtless, it varies somewhat from claim to claim. Nevertheless, any review of social media, of mass media, will present a subset of them -- depending upon the target customer/faction, as true -- as representing the whole truth. Visit the Ben Shapiro forum on Facebook if this is in any way in doubt. The John Oliver forum provides a thematically similar view.
So how does a fringe perspective successfully masquerade as the consensus view among politically polarized groups? Part of the answer is the nature of membership, the nature of tribal affiliations. The other part relates to the dynamics of contemporary media -- professional and user-generated social media.
In some circles, it's widely recognized that online politically focused forums lead to escalating displays of membership. Each member signals their party/tribal loyalty through public recitations of the tribal narrative. This is often accompanied by other more dramatic displays.
Consider the following example:
- Member 1) Those people don't understand the ramifications of their actions.
- Member 2) It's like dealing with children.
- Member 1) Children are innocent. These people are not.
- Member 2) No, they're bad for the nation.
- Member 1) At least. They should all be tried for treason.
- Member 2) They should just be taken out and shot -- they're not destroying the country while I'm alive.
- Member 1) I'm with you there. If good men do nothing... We have to be ready.
This scenario is played out countless times, in countless forums, on all sides of every issue, every day -- likely every minute.
At the same time, we know a few things about the nature of human attention. First, we know that negativity is the most reliable way to capture our attention. It's intuitively obvious, but also a subject of much research. We can turn on the evening news, or browse the most popular social media feeds to see it in action. Science refers to the phenomenon as the negativity bias. The term was made popular by psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman in 2001.
Many theories address the specifics with some of the more compelling relating to the evolutionary advantage such a bias would offer. Dramatic action in response to threats may sometimes be overkill, but inattention to threats will kill you. Especially if that threat is a growl in the dark and you happen to be a hunter-gatherer. And our brains evolved to support hunting and gathering, not political policymaking. Contemporary civilization is a very recent phenomenon. We truly are equipped with brains evolved for life in the forest and on the savannah. And it shows.
That explains our tendency to tune in the frightening, the threatening, and to focus relatively more of our attention on negative presentations. Now, if your business is based upon capturing attention and reselling it for advertising, or for subscription revenue, your customer acquisition and retention policies will align with these facts. This is the situation for all mass media players. It's inescapable. Any story of interest to the specific customer base that promises to capture attention, and hold it, will find it's way to the "front page."
The process of tracking story virality and promoting those stories that capture the greatest attention guarantees this outcome. And if your industry is highly competitive, the tendency is towards more and more outrageous headlines and associated content. And they've no lack of content of this sort.
The sources for this content are the outliers, the fringe populations. They represent people that are both vocal and volatile. Prior to social media, fringe platforms remained fringe. We were insulated from them. The social cost of subscribing to fringe newspapers, for example, could have been significant. Today, however, anything can appear in our feed and never make it to our coffee table or the attention of our neighbors. Social media has become an outlet for fringe views that makes them instantly available. Always vocal, but previously distant, fringe voices are now right in our faces.
If you're an editor looking for compelling content, you look to the radical fringes, not to the majority consensus views. By definition, the consensus is not at issue - it represents agreement and is, therefore, less interesting. In this way, our personal content spaces, our bubbles, fill with increasing amounts of more and more negative, ever more violent, and most importantly, ever more *fringe* content.
The issues, the conflict, the passion, exists at the fringes, among the radical outliers. And so the fringes gradually come to define the argument when in fact they are the farthest from the majority or consensus views. "Tribal" fear fantasies are quickly becoming articles of mass faith.
A Customer-Led Organization
So you want a "product-led" organization. No wait, a "sales-driven" organization. Hold on, maybe it's a "developer-driven" model. Or perhaps you're in that circle of hell where what's actually happening is the HiPPO led organization.
I've seen them all. I've seen them all twice. And I've seen the common patterns of dysfunction that inevitably follow each. Today there is only one model I even consider. It might be called a "customer-led" organization. Before you roll your eyes and turn the page, understand that each of the other types believes they're customer-focused. I've rarely found that to be true.
What constitutes a "customer-led" organization?
Talk to Teresa Torres.
I believe the model she popularized, and I now strive to implement everyw
here I go, represents the state of the art in product management. In sum, it's about continuous customer discovery undertaken by cross-functional teams, rich product-value based test and learn, and a heavy reliance upon the use of visual tools. A core tenet is that product managers must work with stakeholders of all stripes. Transparency and communication are key. Only then does actual buy-in, based upon an accurate shared understanding, happen. The nut there is "continuous customer discovery."
We're not talking about some upfront discussions and the occasional chit chat with the user group, even if that's coupled with the regular review of engagement data. It must be -- it has to be -- continuous and direct customer engagement both quantitatively and qualitatively. There is no substitute. There is no other way to get into the heads of your customers. And we do that in the context of continuous learning and adaptation. As Teresa will tell you:
"It's not just about continuously improving our products, it's about continuously improving our practices."
Does that mean we ignore internal audiences? No. In fact, bringing them into the process is essential. Communicating with them is a big part of the point of employing visual tools. Each constituency has a different perspective. Sales teams understand the buying persona best, for example. Success teams tend to understand the user's practical operational needs the best. Developers can see efficiencies in the implementation. Product managers, absent customer engagement, see only elegant solutions to imagined problems. And HiPPO's just know they're always right. Not one has the bigger picture. This is not a new problem.
By focusing on the customer and being inclusive, we can effectively reconcile the various perspectives before they become competitive perspectives. We help everyone come to grips with the various perspectives. In this way, we avoid missed opportunities and continually evolve to match our changing marketplaces. We become a learning organization. This is key because marketplaces change all the time and companies are rarely able to adapt. I'll address this phenomenon, describe how it manifests, and why it is so unbelievably hard to avoid, in another article.
This model, focused on the customer, makes the best use of the technology, and achieves the business outcomes we're all after.
A LearningForASmallWorld.com Landing Page Example
The LearningforaSmallWorld project rocked. This is one of several of the most successful landing pages we designed. All the images were cleared with the Smithsonian Institution and CBS. All the text, and the concept itself, was my work, done in cooperation with my team. Our graphics support was awesome.
Google Display ads from 2014
I've included only a few examples of the thousands of ads created for this high-end outdoor furniture company. I was not responsible for the photos themselves. I did use the photos to craft the ads. I, along with my teams, have put together countless ads over the years. I'll see if I can't dig up some of the LearningforaSmallWorld ads. Several of the social ads were really quite good.