8 Year-Old Jae’s Thoughts on UX, Gamification, Hacking, Banner Ads, and More

I get my hair cut for free at my aunt’s salon, so every month or so, I go there to get my ears lowered. My favorite part of this routine is that I get to talk to my little cousin Jae. Usually, Jae and I horse around or chat about really important things (such as our mutual aspirations of becoming intergalactic space rangers). This time, however, I noticed that his attention was entirely devoted to the computer screen as he played an online game called Poptropica.

For the next 9 minutes, I interviewed little Jae on various topics such as UX, gamification, hacking, advertising, YouTube, and more. Below is a collection of various responses to some of my questions. Throughout this informal interview, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how natural certain concepts are to Jae. What we might consider as new and/or emerging media are simply the norm for his generation.

Particularly interesting are Jae’s repulsive disposition toward the interruptive nature of banner ads. At just 8 years old, he has already developed a hatred for these digital units and even shamelessly vocalizes his contempt toward them. He explains that the only time he clicks on them are by accident, and it’s easy to see why he gets angry when his gaming experience is interrupted. Initially, this would seem to imply a gloomy outlook for digital advertisers. However, when I ask Jae about his likelihood of clicking an ad if it was incentivized with some sort of in-game integration (E.g. a really cool sword item in Poptropica), his attitude changes. Jae’s shift in attitude may signify the role of contextual incentives in users’ propensity to click on digital ads. This further supports importance of proficiency in UX—that is, understanding users’ motivations and behaviors—when it comes to creating digital drivers and experiences.

Reflecting on our conversation, I’m further convinced that we are not in the middle of a marketing paradigm shift. Rather, the paradigm has already shifted, the game has already changed, and the space has already been disrupted. Indeed, I regard my 8 year-old cousin Jae’s natural aversion towards interruptive advertising, nonchalance towards finding solutions by hacking, and intuitive understanding of game mechanics as a final notice to marketers: Evolve or die.

On gamification and happiness:

On hacking:

On banner ads:

New APIs for Facebook Pages: Which Page Management Company Will Innovate First?

Following the heels of its announcement of Timeline for Pages at its fMC event, Facebook has released a new set of APIs to help brands create more compelling stories and manage relationships more effectively. On March 14, Facebook announced the release of a new set of that reaffirm its stance of allowing third-party developers to play the leading role in helping brands leverage its platform. The new APIs will allow brands to do the following:

• Manage a Page’s milestones
• Manage a Page’s messages
• Edit a Page’s attributes and About section
• Set a custom Page apps image
• Hide (or unhide) a Page post

For marketers and agencies that manage multiple pages, the new APIs provide a way of streamlining the process of building a brand’s timeline and managing relationships. However, most brands will not be building upon these APIs directly. Instead, most brands will look to their page management vendors (such as Vitrue, Buddy Media, Shoutlet, or SpredFast, to name a few of the big fish) to release an update that integrates these new APIs as features into their existing products. NOTE: At the time of this post, none of the previously named companies have posted an update about integrating these new APIs.

22squared Wins Best Agency for Social Media

2011 has been, in many ways, an eventful year for all of us at 22squared. So the opportunity to represent our agency at the iMedia Agency Summit and the 2011 iMedia Agency Awards came as a much-needed experience to network with industry peers and refresh my perspective on the industry landscape. The best part of the experience, however, was having the incredible honor of accepting our award for Best Agency for Social Media.

While it absolutely humbles me to think that just two years ago, I was just a college kid sitting in advertising class, that same thought also invigorates me as I consider just how far I’ve come since then. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to begin my career than at 22squared. As the second hire to come aboard a budding social media department, being honored with an award that declares 22squared as the Best Agency for Social Media speaks volumes not only in regard to how much impact our social team has been able to have on the industry, but also to the agility and innovation of an agency with a rich history in traditional advertising. What excites me the most about 22squared being recognized as a leader in the social media space is that, as a team, we all know that this is only the beginning. The best is, truly, yet to come.

This year’s iMedia Agency Summit was my first iMedia experience, and I must say, the event was very well organized. Here are three things I appreciated most about the event:

1. 1:1 networking sessions coordinated ahead of time. I appreciate it when reps do their homework and try to approach me as an individual, as opposed to just another agency with money to spend. But ultimately, I’m a sucker for efficiency. The quick, 10-minute format for the 1:1 sessions was just the right amount of time to develop rapport and provide information regarding the agency’s needs and the seller’s offerings. Often times at industry events, I’ll end up being conversationally pinned down by a single sales rep that will not let me go. The 1:1 rotating format at the iMedia Agency Summit allowed agency people to be free of any obligatory conversational pressure and instead, get straight to the chase. At the end of the 1:1 sessions, I ended up with a three-inch stack of business cards from various companies, many of which I plan to follow up with in the coming weeks.

2. Seller variety. I’m in the middle of my transition from a strategist working purely in the social space, to one who works across digital as a whole to ensure cohesion and connectedness among brand experiences. Throughout this process, I’ve been introduced to all sorts of technology companies. As someone whose role it is to act as a strategic bridge among the various departments within our agency, the variety of sellers—from mobile ad networks, to location-based behavioral targeting, to cloud-based creative optimization—present at the iMedia Agency Summit allowed me to immerse myself in many different sectors of the digital advertising landscape.

3. Collaboration among buyers and sellers. This event truly brought both sides together. There was a sense of mutual appreciation among buyers and sellers that pervaded the entire event. This collaborative atmosphere isn’t promoted enough in the industry, and the folks at iMedia Connection deserve much appreciation and respect for the types of relationships they’re striving to foster among agencies and vendors. It’s apparent they understand the importance of developing strategic partnerships among sellers and agencies, and I applaud them for all the hard work they put into organizing the iMedia Agency Summit.

I didn’t even go into how beautiful the resort was, or how decadent and lavish the receptions were, because content and business opportunities are much more important when evaluating events like this. I’d definitely consider attending more iMedia events and wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to recommend it to any of my peers. Be sure to check out iMedia’s upcoming summits.

All Facebook Fans Aren’t Created Equal: Participation Inequality and the 90-9-1 Rule

Researcher Jakob Nielson suggests that when considering the internet as a network of communities, most large-scale communities consist of users who don’t participate very often. He also explains that most of the content contributed to these communities originate from a small majority of very active users. Nielson refers to this discrepancy as participation inequality and speculates that it typically follows a 90-9-1 rule in which users fall into one of three categories: Lurkers, Intermittent Contributors, and Heavy Contributors.

The 90-9-1 rule aplies to even an inherently social platform such as Facebook. As shown by Adam Mosseri in his presentation presentation during UX Week 2010 about user data’s impact on product design at Facebook, 20% of users generate 85% of content on Facebook. This data comes as no surprise. Many users have those two or three friends within their own communities of Facebook friends who comment on what seems like every status update on their wall and update their own status a hundred times throughout the day. Mosseri makes an important point in citing the Facebook product team’s commitment to accommodating not only to those 20% of power users, but to the lighter users as well.

As brand Pages on Facebook amass millions of fans—becoming large-scale communities—participation inequality challenges brands looking to build a community of advocates on Facebook. The existence of participation inequality within brands’ Facebook communities demonstrates the existence of another hierarchy similar to the one Nielson describes. Brands must recognize the existence of these different types of fans, as they represent varying levels of value for a brand.

• Withdrawn Fans — fans who have hidden a brand’s posts from the News Feed
• Latent Fans — fans who see a brand’s posts in the News Feed but don’t interact with them
• Active Fans — fans who see a brand’s posts in the News Feed and interact occasionally
• Hyperactive Fans — fans who see a brand’s posts in the News Feed and interact often

In fact, Facebook inherently acknowledges this notion, as evidenced by EdgeRank, the algorithm that programmatically decides which stories appear in a user’s News Feed. Firstly, affinity—one of three key components in EdgeRank—draws upon historical interaction data between the viewing user and the originating source of the News Feed story. The premise is that activity from a brand Page that a user interacts on a more frequent basis signifies a more important connection to the user than one with which the user rarely interacts. Therefore, a fan that interacts more frequently with a brand’s Facebook Page holds greater value for that brand. Whereas affinity signifies the frequency of activity, weight, another factor of EdgeRank, demonstrates the different types of activity a fan may take to interact with a brand Page’s content. Simply stated, actions that require more effort from the fan (such as a comment or share) signify greater weight values than lightweight actions (such as a Like). In order to maximize visibility and engagement within the News Feed, then, a brand must incorporate two elements of News Feed Optimization into its Facebook content strategy:

1. Diversity. Content that elicits different types of actions with varying weight values (Shares, Comments, Likes, Clicks).
2. Consistency. A dedication to consistently post engaging content, in order to increase affinity scores among fans.

The existence of these different types and values of Facebook fans further proves that marketing on Facebook—or any other social media network, for that matter—requires a long-term commitment and insightful strategy. Furthermore, the notion of participation inequality supports the claim that when it comes to social media, content indeed reigns supreme.