The Taste Gap
So many of us get into social media because we admire the work of creatives in the field, the brilliant memes, the awe inspiring videos, the perspective altering tweets. But there’s a gap when we start. What we produce doesn’t live up to our own expectations. Ira Glass’ insights on the creative process remind us to push through the frustrating beginnings of creative work, and keep working until what we produce reflects our good taste
Recombiner
So many of us get into social media because we admire the work of creatives in the field, the brilliant memes, the awe inspiring videos, the perspective altering tweets. But there’s a gap when we start. What we produce doesn’t live up to our own expectations. Our taste exceeds our ability.
“A lot of people never get past this phase," notes Ira Glass because they succumb to the disappointment of producing work that doesn’t match up to the sky-high expectations set by their taste. Every creative has at least once considered packing it in and pursuing the most un-creative career trajectory possible, simply to avoid the heartbreak of knowing their work doesn’t quite cut it.
by Recombiner
“In the beginning, and for a while afterwards we know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have,” says Glass. “We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
It’s tempting sometimes just to stop trying to be excellent, to start filling the content calendar with “content” rather than striving for the breakthrough executions that get noticed and engaged with. So even as you cringe at your first attempts, recognise the taste gap. Then get back to writing your headline 25 times until it’s as catchy as it can be.
And maybe - if you work damn hard at it - your ability will catch up with your taste.
Ira Glass on the Creative Process:
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Cultural Cartography: How Buzzfeed organises their content
Last year, Buzzfeed started a project to formally categorize their content. They called it "cultural cartography." It formalized an informal practice that they've had for a really long time: don't just think about the subject matter; think also about, and in fact, primarily about, the job that your content is doing for the reader or the viewer.
By Dao Nguyen
Last year, some BuzzFeed employees were scheming to prank their boss, Ze Frank, on his birthday. They decided to put a family of baby goats in his office.
BuzzFeed had recently signed on to the Facebook Live experiment, and so naturally, we decided to livestream the whole event on the internet to capture the moment when Ze would walk in and discover livestock in his office. We thought the whole thing would last maybe 10 minutes, and a few hundred company employees would log in for the inside joke. But what happened? They kept on getting delayed: he went to get a drink, he was called to a meeting, the meeting ran long, he went to the bathroom. More and more people started logging in to watch the goats. By the time Ze walked in more than 30 minutes later, 90,000 viewers were watching the livestream.
Now, our team had a lot of discussion about this video and why it was so successful. It wasn't the biggest live video that we had done to date (the biggest one that we had done involved a fountain of cheese). But it performed so much better than we had expected. What was it about the goats in the office that we didn't anticipate?
Now, a reasonable person could have any number of hypotheses. Maybe people love baby animals. Maybe people love office pranks. Maybe people love stories about their bosses or birthday surprises. But our team wasn't really thinking about what the video was about. We were thinking about what the people watching the video were thinking and feeling. We read some of the 82,000 comments that were made during the video, and we hypothesized that they were excited because they were participating in the shared anticipation of something that was about to happen. They were part of a community, just for an instant, and it made them happy.
So we decided that we needed to test this hypothesis. What could we do to test this very same thing? The following week, armed with the additional knowledge that food videos are very popular, we dressed two people in hazmat suits and wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded.
Eight hundred thousand people watched the 690th rubber band explode the watermelon, marking it as the biggest Facebook Live event to date.
The question I get most frequently is: How do you make something go viral? The question itself is misplaced; it's not about the something. It's about what the people doing the something - reading or watching - what are they thinking?
Now, most media companies, when they think about metadata, they think about subjects or formats. It's about goats, it's about office pranks, it's about food, it's a list or a video or a quiz, it's 2,000 words long, it's 15 minutes long, it has 23 embedded tweets or 15 images. Now, that kind of metadata is mildly interesting, but it doesn't actually get at what really matters. What if, instead of tagging what articles or videos are about, what if we asked: How is it helping our users do a real job in their lives?
The Cultural Cartography of Social Content
Last year, we started a project to formally categorize our content in this way. We called it, "cultural cartography." It formalized an informal practice that we've had for a really long time: don't just think about the subject matter; think also about, and in fact, primarily about, the job that your content is doing for the reader or the viewer.
Let me show you the map that we have today. Each bubble is a specific job, and each group of bubbles in a specific color are related jobs.
First up: humour. "Makes me laugh." There are so many ways to make somebody laugh. You can be laughing at someone, you could laugh at specific internet humour, you could be laughing at some good, clean, inoffensive dad jokes.
"This is me." Identity. People are increasingly using media to explain, "This is who I am. This is my upbringing, this is my culture, this is my fandom, this is my guilty pleasure, and this is how I laugh about myself."
The "Helps me Connect with Another Person" category
"Helps me connect with another person." This is one of the greatest gifts of the internet. It's amazing when you find a piece of media that precisely describes your bond with someone. The green bubbles make up the group of jobs that help me do something -- 'helps me settle an argument'; 'helps me learn something about myself or another person'; or 'helps me explain my story'.
The orange bubbles are the group of jobs that makes me feel something -- makes me curious or sad or restores my faith in humanity.
“If we can capture in data what really matters to you, and if we can understand the role that our work plays in your actual life, the better content we can create for you, and the better that we can reach you”
Many media companies and creators do put themselves in their audiences' shoes. But in the age of social media, we can go much farther. People are connected to each other on Facebook, on Twitter, and they're increasingly using media to have a conversation and to talk to each other. If we can be a part of establishing a deeper connection between two people, then we will have done a real job for these people.
Let me give you an example of how this plays out. This is one of my favorite lists: "32 Memes You Should Send Your Sister Immediately". It has things that are relatable, like: "When you're going through your sister's stuff, and you hear her coming up the stairs." Absolutely, I've done that. "Watching your sister get in trouble for something that you did and blamed on her." Yes, I've done that as well. This list got three million views. Why is that? Because it did, very well, several jobs: "This is us." "Connect with family." "Makes me laugh."
Now, we can even apply this framework to recipes and food. A recipe's normal job is to tell you what to make for dinner or for lunch. And this is how you would normally brainstorm for a recipe: you figure out what ingredients you want to use, what recipe that makes, and then maybe you slap a job on at the end to sell it. But what if we flipped it around and thought about the job first? One brainstorming session involved the job of bonding. So, could we make a recipe that brought people together? This is not a normal brainstorming process at a food publisher. So we know that people like to bake together, and we know that people like to do challenges together, so we decided to come up with a recipe that involved those two things, and we challenged ourselves: Could we get people to say, "Hey, BFF, let's see if we can do this together"? The resulting video was the "Fudgiest Brownies Ever" video. It was enormously successful in every metric possible -- 50 million views. And people said the exact things that we were going after: "Hey, Colette, we need to make these, are you up for a challenge?" "Game on." It did the job that it set out to do, which was to bring people together over baking and chocolate.
Metadata and Storymaking
I'm really excited about the potential for this project. When we talk about this framework with our content creators, they instantly get it, no matter what beat they cover, what country they’re in, or what language they speak. So cultural cartography has helped us massively scale our workforce training. When we talk about this project and this framework with advertisers and brands, they also instantly get it, because advertisers, more often than media companies, understand how important it is to understand the job that their products are doing for customers.
But the reason I'm the most excited about this project is because it changes the relationship between media and data. Most media companies think of media as "mine." How many fans do I have? How many followers have I gained? How many views have I gotten? How many unique IDs do I have in my data warehouse? But that misses the true value of data, which is that it's yours. If we can capture in data what really matters to you, and if we can understand more the role that our work plays in your actual life, the better content we can create for you, and the better that we can reach you.
Who are you? How did you get there? Where are you going? What do you care about? What can you teach us? That's cultural cartography.
As a Media Analytics Expert and Publisher of BuzzFeed, Dao Nguyen thinks about how media spreads online and the technology and data that publishers can use to understand why. Dao Nguyen is the Publisher of BuzzFeed, a reinvention of the traditional title in which she oversees the company’s tech, product, data and publishing platform, as well as ad product, pricing, and distribution. Nguyen joined BuzzFeed in 2012 and has been instrumental in its rapid growth as the largest independent digital media company in the world
This is an extract from a 2017 talk delivered by Dao Nguyen entitled "What Makes Something Go Viral?" delivered at TedNYC, published under a Creative Commons Attribution License
What is Social Currency? Why do you need it, and how you get more of it?
You know what's cool? Social Currency is cool. Social Currency is what you have when you participate in a hot topic and contribute valuable discussion points. It's what you have when you discover some juicy gossip before anyone else. Social currency is knowing something that others want to know. It's relevance that you can exchange for benefits ranging from money to esteem to friendship and more.
You know what's cool? Social Currency is cool. Social Currency is what you have when you participate in a hot topic and contribute valuable discussion points. It's what you have when you discover some juicy gossip before anyone else. Social currency is knowing something that others want to know. It's relevance that you can exchange for benefits ranging from money to esteem to friendship and more.
The paradox of social currency is that the more you share it, the more you have it. The trick is: it's time sensitive. You need to share your currency when people are most likely to find it interesting, and that is increasingly as it happens.
To see social currency in action, go to Twitter and have a look at the trending news topics. On every topic people are sharing memes and insights to the discussion. What do they get from it? Social Currency. But it doesn't spread evenly, here the Matthew Effect applies: "to those who have shall be given more"
Fashion is also a form of social currency. A look is hot for a small time, and if you get onto the trend early you benefit the most from it. Fashion through the lens of a sociologist is basically a conversation - it's showing that you're plugged into the stream of coolness and style.
According to Wikipedia, the concept of social currency derives from Pierre Bourdieu's social capital theory and relates to increasing one's sense of community, granting access to information and knowledge, helping to form one's identity, and providing status and recognition.
Social Currency is one of the primary reasons why content spreads online. Jonah Berger, who has spent a decade investigating what makes things go viral, says there are 6 principles of virality (STEPPS):
Social currency – we share what makes us look good.
Triggers – we share what’s at the top of our minds.
Emotion – we share what we care about.
Public – we imitate what we see people around us are doing.
Practical value – we share things that have value to others.
Stories – We share stories, not information.
How do you get more of it?
Gathering social currency is not just about sources of information, it is about your own skills and ability to make sense of the information you get and share it with panache. As with most things social, you need to develop momentum - developing habits and systems to feed you fresh insight, developing trusted sources, and growing your following as you interpret the info you get.
Some practical tips:
- participate in live events and conferences where thought-leaders and pioneers are speaking and attending.
- curate your news feeds for relevant insight
- participate in Twitter trending topics and see how much traction you can get with your commentary.
The Social Campaign Canvas
The Social Campaign Canvas helps you conceptualise a high interest announcement or event on social media that delivers measurable business or campaign value.
The social campaign canvas one-page framework that coaches you through 9 considerations to create an event on social media that gets noticed and delivers business value.
This post explains how the canvas works, and at the end you can click a button to download the .pdf to print out and use.
The Pillars
Dynamics
- Business Purpose corresponds with Content Conversion - i.e How do you ensure your content delivers on your business objective.
- Your Partners need to correspond with the Community - Partners give you access to your community, can give your credibility in that community, and help you with messaging and concept for the community.
- Your Values need to be expressed clearly in the creative Concept, this gives emotional consistency and depth to the campaign.
- Your Message is what you want to say, the Topic is what people are interested in talking about. Ultimately, you need to combine the two to ensure your message gets through in a way that's interesting a relevant.
- And at the centre of the canvas are your Audience. The reason we're doing the campaign is to get them to act, and so everything on the canvas should relate to them and what is most likely to work.
Working with the Canvas
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