Hill+Knowlton Strategies

• Substance (including parts, structure and quantity)
• Form (including pattern, order and quality)

An article in Nature this week suggests that we make up our minds about websites within 50 milliseconds of viewing them. These brief glimpses can have a lasting impact known as the “halo effect” whereby minor faults are thereafter overlooked. As we tend to enjoy being right, it’s natural that we persevere with a website that delivered a positive first impression.

This research evidence complements that of Jane Raymond, a consumer psychologist at the University of Wales in Bangor. According to the New Scientist her team used a camera embedded in a pair of specs to record people’s gaze as they glanced at adverts while shopping or commuting. They found that hardly any ads made an impression at all: only around 1 per cent could be recalled without prompting. We may be exposed to brand messages all day long, but most of the time we’re just not taking them in.

Rayond blames this on the “attentional blink” whereby our awareness tends to plummet as we focus our attention on one thing in particular: So if something catches your attention, your brain is blind to anything else for a short period afterwards. Researchers have also found that if people are distracted by an image or brand when performing an intellectually demanding task, they tend to instantly dislike it, regardless of its emotional value. (Bad news for banners!)

The conclusion Raymond has reached is that in these times of attention overload, brand messages should be presented in a more absorbable way.

There’s a handy guide to consumer-generated media in this months’ CorpComms magazine, sponsored by us.

It’s a non-threatening introduction to the world of blogs, podcasts and community media, written specifically for the corporate communicator. We hope it get more companies in the UK interested in the opportunities that it raises.

If you can’t wait for your copy, here’s a PDF to download (833Kb).

Kevin Kelly’s decade-old but still seminal book Out of Control explained why it is so tricky to artificially assemble organic complexity. Describing how scientists sought to re-establish a lost prairie, the co-founder of Wired outlined why the web of relationships between all the different plant and animal species was so difficult to re-construct without knowing the precise sequence of their arrival and integration naturally.

The makers of Coca-Cola’s Zero Movement website had a good idea what a natural online grassroots campaign would look like, they just didn’t want to have to go to the actual trouble of fostering one. So they knocked up an ersatz version and optimistically hoped that their target demographic wouldn’t notice the absence of the Real Thing!

Kevn Kelly is currently researching his new book in which he hopes to answer the question: what does technology want? Unsurprisingly he is already “writing aloud” on Technium, which he describes as “a semi-blog“.

It is instructive to follow the debate in academic circles about the impact of migrating to online publishing models, particularly because it demonstrates a grown-up appreciation of what might be lost as well as of what is there to be gained.

There’s a recognition that blogging is fostering broader, more immediate conversations between peer-groups, extending conversations and connections that previously might have burgeoned only around the time of annual conventions.

• Trackbacks: bibliographies currently allow scholarly discussions to be tracked backwards in time, but if each citation triggered a ping on each cited text it would become possible for all future researchers to follow the conversation forwards in time
• Versioning: research texts would have greater freedom to change and to grow, a process that would be traceable
• Comments: electronic glosses within text could re-shape the process of peer-review.

The academic world is one with a well-entrenched set of gatekeepers representing organisations that are traditionally hierarchical in the extreme. Of course the open, organic model has its detractors yet some of the possibilities offered by electronic discourse remain unnerving for authors as well as the gatekeepers. Wiki-style versioning could mean that some research projects enter the public domain before formal assessment. This and the notion of visible, traceable change are perhaps the most radical, but even the idea of collaborative scholarship will strike some (especially in the humanities) as relatively outlandish.

It’s clear that academia is making tentative steps towards a new publishing and review model; it certainly won’t be gatekeeper-free, but a whole set of new controls are likely to be experimented with before a settled solution emerges. And many of the same pressures are likely to be felt in similarly-structured professions in the near future.

There’s an interesting new blog hosting a public reserach project called The End of Cyberspace which champions the idea that going online will increasingly feel less and less like travel to a separate virtual world - especially now that always-on devices are beginning to proliferate and many people use the Net as their primary tool for managing their social relationships:

“Our experience of interacting with digital information is changing. We’re moving to a world in which we (or objects acting on our behalf) are online all the time, everywhere. Designers and computer scientists are also trying hard to create a new generation of devices and interfaces that don’t monopolize our attention, but ride on the edges of our awareness. We’ll no longer have to choose between cyberspace and the world; we’ll constantly access the first while being fully part of the second. Because of this, the idea of cyberspace as separate from the real world will collapse. “

Further to my post yesterday, John Esposito has joined the debate about Amazon Connect. He too picks up on the lack of two-way communication but adds that he is interested by “the idea of blogging while writing a book as a way of generating and improving ideas,” which he thinks “is far more applicable to non-fiction where a good author will constantly be on the lookout for injecting new thought into a project.”

In my post from 24/11/05 I asked readers to “imagine a restaurant or film critic’s blog that blended their own with comments from both customers and fellow critics”. I had an interesting comment from Neil Mclean of the Travel PR blog who is considering just such a collaborative review blog: “I wrote restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times in Scotland for about 16 years. All very much one way traffic as per usual. If I can find a sponsor I’ll set up a public review site/mash up with Google maps, Flickr tags etc.”

Amazon Connect is a new facility open to “a select group of authors”. Given that it allows authors to post messages on their book and profile pages it has been touted as a blog, but as it lacks both comments and an RSS feed it is as yet but a toe in the water from the e-retail giant.

“Blogs are a long tail” Chris Anderson recently observed, in a post otherwise dedicated to explaining why so many people are uncomfortable with systems that depend on the “alien logic” of probabilistic statistics such as Google and Wikipedia. What he means is that you are far less likely to find a single blog that provides a comprehensive and authoritative viewpoint on any given matter than you would be in the traditional media. On the long tail pre-filtering is limited, and both quality and influence highly variable.

But there’s something even more alien about blogs to our everyday ways of analysis than Google. Search engines are still engineered around a reductionist view of the Web – reducing its millions of websites and individual pages to measurable units with defined values. Then sheer scale and processing power create the illusion of a holistic representation of the content available online.

Recent advances in online media monitoring and analysis have followed the Google lead, applying complex, speedy algorithms to search criteria and statistical models to their output – but the approach is still essentially reductionist in nature. It’s not surprising that digital media monitoring specialists like Cymfony still appear more comfortable talking about blog monitoring than about blog analysis. This is because the blogosphere is inherently more holistic and the statistical/reductionist methodology - only just getting some traction within the community of communications professionals - is consequently less effective at extracting insights here. (It’s possibly also why there’s still no fully satisfactory blog search engine out there. The blogosphere is the webbiest part of the Web. )

So perhaps many of the same communications analysts that have struggled to educate their colleagues about the rigorous ’scientific’ outlook needed to understand the media in their new digital garb will themselves have to learn how to think more organically if they are to successfully define the value of blogging and other social media on the Net.

Jeff Nolan asks whether business decision makers read blogs, on behalf of his CMO.

In the comments, I argue that it doesn’t matter:

You’re right Jeff, this is an important question that deserves answering. I’d argue it’s the wrong question though, and it doesn’t actually matter whether business decision makers read blogs (I don’t think “reading” a blog is a good qualifier, anyway – a lot of people wouldn’t know whether they’re looking at a blog or not – it’s just a web page they clicked on when they searched “SAP” on Google).

I think CMOs should actually be asking themselves “is an opinion expressed about my company/brand/product/service online worth knowing about?” If not, then fine, walk away. If it is, then forget about who else is reading it. Just make sure you are!

Does your CMO care about opinions expressed online about your company, and if so is he/she reading them?