brands: long tails, complex systems, stories, communities

Sean offers a link to this paper by Mohammed Iqbal. It's fascinating reading because it provides a grounding for a fancy that I've been toying with for a while now: brands as complex systems.

The Long Tail of Meaning

MI's paper talks about a power law distribution of brand propositions associated with a brand. You might even call these brand propositions (with their rational and emotional aspects, their blind cravings for meaning, their roots in lived experience) by another name: "stories". Trad advertising focuses on identifying what the big stories around a brand are. May be one, may be two, a handful at most. These stories can then be blast-broadcasted out via TV, print, even a viral widget for Facebook. However these stories are simply the biggest, loudest and most palatable associated with a brand. They aren't all the stories out there.

Narrative Ecosystems

One thing the long tail model doesn't make very clear is that entities you find in the distribution may not be isolated from each other. Just as a curve in sand may be the mark left by a snake, the long tail itself is the mark made on a distribution of entities (books, songs, brand propositions, dreams) by human choice. If you've ever worked with stories, you'll realise that they exist in an ecosystem - the long tale tail chatters to itself uncontrollably. There may be a single story that someone wants to communicate perfectly to their consumers, employees, citizens or subjects; but once it has been released into the wild it rarely stays unchanged. Instead it interacts with all the related stories that are being told. You don't own your brand. You never did but that comforting deceit is becoming harder and harder to maintain. You can't control the story ecosystem - you can influence it, engage with it, add to it but you can't control it.

Joining the Swarm: Communities

Trad advertising (TVCs, print) still works reasonably well for the head of the tail or the simple/complicated domains. It's not going way but as the rest of the tail and the complexity that forms it becomes more visible, we need other ways of dealing with it. Which is where those pesky community things come in. The stories/meaning/brand propositions become more diffuse and far more messy. You get the whole distribution around you, not the edited 30-second highlights. The leadership that's required here is a little different from yer standard issue.

The gift of the internet has been to surface human behaviour as much as it has been to change it. Can we handle that?

measurement in complex systems

Further to the previous post, why do we measure? Operationally the main reason we need information to make decisions (indeed to find out if we need to make a decision in the first place). Quantitative information is needed to work out how much of something we need to do.

Now in ordered systems, that's straight-forward. My car is 2 litres low on oil. So I add 2 litres of oil. Job done.

The issue is that many systems are not ordered and these complex systems have 2 annoying properties:

1. Input-output may not be linear. A small change to the system may have a big (even catastrophic) effect.
2. By measuring the system we may actually change its state - e.g. sending out an employee engagement survey may actually raise or lower employee engagement.

So these 2 properties require us to:

1. Measure the system more regularly when we make changes so we can understand whether our impact is greater or smaller than expected. We need to sense it.
2. Use plenty of indirect measures that are less likely to be disturbed by our intervention.

Now I believe that the social media ecosystem is more often a complex environment than it is a simple one. So we need measurement systems that fulfil the 2 criteria above.

A little

Often

And off to one side.

Let me go off and find some examples of what these might be. One example might be the monitoring of tag clouds.

perspective shifts on the innovation process

A few weeks ago, Bob Sutton posted on the veracity (or otherwise) of the innovation process in most organisations. I've been pondering this, esp. after some debate with Lauchlan. My take is that organisations do need processes to manage new product development and other forms of innovation. Such processes will probably take the form of a stage gate system. However Bob's point is that most individuals in an organisation will not experience innovation in the nice linear fashion the stage gate model suggests. The uncertainty and politics of the Volvo cartoon will be closer to the day-to-day lives of those involved.

A similar cognitive dissonance can be felt when comparing a gantt chart to actual memories of a project. Project plans seem sterile compared to the rollercoaster rides of most projects. Understanding, managing & preparing for this dissonance is something that goes on in the background in most organisations. This is especially important for newbies - when the process manual or method says one thing but everyone else knows that in this case, you have to do something else.

I've been playing with the Cynefin framework & innovation stories - getting people to map the experiences of protagonists in these stories as journeys across the model as a contrast to linear innovation models. Does anyone have other ideas on dealing with this area?

Dave Snowden casts his pod

First Patrick, then Shawn & now Dave hits us with his KM Australia 2007 gear. What is it with my favorite KM thinkers putting their stuff out there for free!!!

I agree with most of DS's positions (which will not doubt infuriate him). There is one thing that I think he is half wrong about at the 22:40 on the KM Australia keynote mp3.

DS states that creativity does not lead to innovation but rather the reverse - i.e. creativity is the product of an innovative system. And that innovation requires starvation, pressure & diversity.

Here I think he's half right. Trying to get people to be "creative" if everything around them shows that such creativity will not be recognised, rewarded, etc is foolish and heart-breaking. Innovation (as a complex social system) determines and is determined by individual creativity. However, research indicates that starvation & pressure is not always useful for creativity. It may be useful at an organisational level for innovation because a threatening environment can increase an organisation's appetite for risk.

If you want creativity & innovation there is a productive tension between giving people the room (intellectual, emotional) they need to innovate and allowing the organisation to stay off-balance enough to implement those innovations.

BTW I hadn't seen the traffic light /roundabout example before - loved 'em...