Got to see an excellent talk this weekend called Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is a feeling of creepyness you get when a computer created person gets between 96% and 99% indistinguishably real.

While we can project empathy and emotion on a simpler figure (think stick figure), and marvel at something like the creatures in Shrek, if they get just a little more real, it’s terribly disturbing. It seems the best way right now to mitigate this feeling is with context and writing.

In a movie like avatar, the filmmaker has the ability to create a completely artificial environment, suspending our disbelief of reality and then playing in that realm with figures we forgive. The writing helps us develop emotional connections to the characters, and then we overlook flaws that might otherwise make us uncomfortable.

What’s interesting is how much we deal with the concept of the uncanny valley in social communications right now. We’re at a point in society where brands can understand more about people’s habits than they know about themselves. A recent example of this is where we see social data that tells us the majority of people in an audience love Kid Rock. If we write a status update about Kid Rock it feels coincidental. If we post on one person’s wall that we see they like Kid Rock, it’s super creepy.

Luckily, simple, sound storytelling and personification without personalization are the order of the day. In CGI, we can tell that it’s not a person because the eyes reflect too much light, or an eyebrow furrows without the lower eyelid moving up just a millimeter.

The difference between a glass of milk and a glass of paint is a subtle translucence. The difference between facilitating conversation, making people feel welcome in a community and feeling like you’re being watched is a subtle but crucial four percent.

What do you think? Please continue the conversation in the comments below or on Twitter @mleis.

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When a person likes a brand page, it only heavily weights the appearance of that page content for a short amount of time in the persons top news feed. During this window, if that person or their friends doesn’t engage in that content in any way (expanding comments or likes, liking, commenting, visiting the page, looking at a picture), the page content stops appearing.

The upside is that you do have a window in which to present content that your audience cares about. This is where content strategy, and having a participation framework to continue conversations (interactions to the system) mean so much.

It’s also where we start to see facebook’s separation between likes, which is quickly becoming a paid and app development metric, and active users / impressions as measures of retention. Based on what I’ve seen among clients over the past year is that the cost per like has risen dramatically: from an average of $1/like to $2.50 or so recently. And the window to retain attention lasts about a week.

If you’re ready for that week with updates that matter to the audience, not only will you retain and engage them, you’ll start showing up in the top news of their friends, actually using the system to help propel the brand to exponential exposure (ComScore / Facebook study says a multiplier between 32 and 81 friends of fans), and provide a compounding return on the paid media.

What do you think? Add your perspective in the comments or @mleis!

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There are two reasons why this could actually happen: t.co links and Korea:

In case you didn’t notice, last week Twitter took a major step forward, automatically wrapping every link longer than 20 characters in a t.co shortened link. This is a big big deal: it means that they now have mature enough technology to “see inside” every shortened link that passes through the system. Which means they can also start understanding the relationships between people and content immediately. One way to see this technology at work is by clicking the number next to the “tweet” button. Check out these search results on a recent article published in DMNews:

The search query is the URL, but the results return three different link shortners. Twitter is opening these links and the closing them back up, basically just for continuity of experience at this point. So while Google+ attempts to get people to attach +1 to their search results, Twitter will merely be exposing the mountain of existing shared links thanks to three years of tireless, quiet work under the hood. This is where Korea figures in…

As far as I know, Korea is still the only country where Google can’t get to the majority of the people using its service. In fact, they can only get about 5% of the country’s users to choose Google. Weird, right? Korea was the first country to have ubiquitous high-speed internet available to all citizens, and that culture uses a service called Navver. Where Google finds you Web pages based on Page Rank, Navver returns reviews which contain links to sites. Recommendations from people like you is most important, then looking for filtered links from those people follows.

There’s a powerful confluence here: Being able to effectively search for information filtered by how appropriate it is for you instead of just how relevant the page is to your search term? That’s the kind of valuable, interesting, entertaining result people will not only want, but find hard to turn away from; especially as we demand faster answers from people we are comfortable with, through exponentially faster, ubiquitous technology infrastructure.

What do you think? Continue the conversation here or @mleis.

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Our client had an initial vision similar to many clients these days: let’s do a $500-a-day giveaway and “make it  social” by putting it on Facebook, with a goal of getting new likes. So, in an effort to not just replace the postcard entries of yesteryear with FB connect, we added two basic functions:

1. Sharing the app with your friends
2. The first five friends who enter automatically give you one new entry per friend

If you look at these two functions alone, in the context of the reasonable chances you have of winning the $500, it’s easy to see that you as a player wouldn’t want to take advantage of either offer: they both reduce your own chances of winning. In fact, if you use the application successfully, you’ll end up farther away from winning by ten entries.

Apparently, none of this matters in comparison to the unknown riches of social capital. Being able to share entries entitles the player to Brian Reynold’s concept about Asynchronous Gaming (the importance of being able to play together towards a goal without having to be in the same place at the same time): the people who initially entered the giveaway changed it from a monetary loss as an outcome to the winning feeling of having five stronger online relationships by giving their friends entry into the contest.

What resulted astounded us all: the page started the week at 15k likes, with a mutually agreed on goal for the week of 35k. By the time we got to Friday, the page tallies better than 145k likes, with even a small residual bump of fans in the week after.

Friends win by a landslide!

Let me know what you think by continuing the conversation below, or @mleis

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Here’s what I’ve boiled down, which I hope helps you think differently, critically about what and how you approach your next social effort:

Make everything possible sharable, and use double entendre / ambiguity in the status updates

Asynchronous group play: help people achieve a goal without being in the same place at the same time. 

Make the player the hero of the story

Create hidden patterns that players can discover

Make it fun by creating choices that lead to surprises

Design for five minutes of gameplay

The funny thing is that this list really makes sense when you start looking at companies like groupon, google, apple, popular brand pages and apps.

For now, let’s leave it there, and ask you: have you been using similar principals? Are you seeing them be used well? Drop me a line here in the comments or continue the conversation on twitter @mleis….

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Yesterday’s memorable SXSW talk, the one that will be ringing in my mind for some time was “The New Frontier of Social Gaming,” delivered by Brian Reynolds from Zynga. What he’s working in is fascinating: the science of people having fun together on the internet.

Concepts like people playing together at different points in time, our need for patterns, how our non-commenting friends are compelling us to over-play games. Just an incredible amount of behavioral insight into how and why we play together, as well as a peek into his process.

It’s speakers like this that get me coming back to SXSW. Here’s the notes from the session. Hope it gets you thinking about all the different applications as it did me.

And as always, let’s continue the conversation here or @mleis

=====================================

What’s the most sharable word on facebook?

It’s “sex.”

The second most is “facebook.”

“like” is a distant third.

In the talk about what makes social successful, presented by zynga, offered a treasure trove of data-driven insights about peoples behavior.

Aside from what we know, that there has to be ways to represent what’s unique about you, it gets way more interesting.

For one, the people that just watch the updates and never play are who fuel people to play and pay: because of social capital. That’s what gets people to play social games too much. And when you want to play too much, that’s when you have to pay.

Another great story was with frontierville. It went viral because testing showed that people liked to move the sheep.

So they added in the option to post moving the sheep to your wall. The comments and clicks to the game skyrocketed. That resulted in appearing at the top of everyones news feed. Even more clicks.

Why?

Because to adults, the icon of the woman and the sheep were in a sexually ambiguous position in the icon. All the comments Were along the lines of “what is she doing with that sheep?”

So they redesigned all of their frontierville icons to include innuendo that kids would never get, but gets incredibly high involvement from adults.

Socializing is everything to zynga, because it’s everything to the players. They want to share almost every game interaction, and zynga needs to enable that to be successful.

On games: Give people satisfying interactions. People like to fill five minutes of boredom. Give them satisfying experiences that fit.

Play asynchronously. Let people play together without having to play at the same time. There’s too much friction in forcing people to play the same game at the same time.

Have fun!

Okay, so what does that mean?

1- series of interesting choices

2- recognizing and learning patterns Our brains are made to do this. To a fault.

Turns out it’s not only distracting, but keeps your brain more active. (me: crossword anyone?)

3- surprise and delight: laughter

Prototype an idea: actually build it!

Play it over and over. Never stop revising.

Show it to more people, revise more.

Keep playing and revising!

Things to try: More choices. Let the player have fun.

Make choices matter more

Build in a story and make me the hero.

Hide patterns I can learn over time.

Create more surprise, suspense, and humor.

Add another social element, like cooperation.

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In game mechanics, Amy Jo Kim would call that the implied exchange.

In terms of behavioral economics, it’s about surprising your customers with gifts like Zappos’ expedited shipping at no extra cost. Zappos already knows that they get what’s called “skip zone” benefits from UPS because of the volume of stuff they ship. But they hold that information and make it separate from the purchase path so that it becomes a surprise gift.

The gift economy is driving many of today’s business successes, like the fiesta movement: driving marketing costs down by changing the way businesses structure relationships into products and gifts.

I am lucky enough to have been invited to talk a little about gifts, surprises, and marketing at DraftFCB as part of John Kenny’s excellent series on behavioral economics as part of the Institute of Decision Making. Let’s go to the video tape!

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Not sure if this has rolled out to everyone yet, but there’s new functionality that pops-up photos in Facebook instead of taking people away to a different screen.

As mentioned in this cool, detailed post showing how they got to this design, it’s also worth looking at the all-new ad space provided in an area that is difficult to look away from. In fact, it seems like the best-designed ad space yet. But what makes this paid media different from any other?

The key here is focusing the viewer on a smaller set of information than at any other point in the Facebook experience. Once you’ve gained that focus, there’s an incredible amount of personal attachment between the people in the photo and the people viewing it.

Put together, what we have is incredibly targeted, attention-getting ad space. Think about how this would work in an app where a user has tagged a place and a brand to a picture with a description. Now, Facebook not only has your attention, but in branded places like retail stores, entertainment destinations, restaurants, these advertisers can follow our DraftFCB rule of No Passive Media, and create an ad that makes sense to the context and provides the viewer with a logical next step to explore more of the brand story.

Even more, let’s not forget about the basic human behavior of wanting to mimic or be a part of what our friends are doing. A well-placed ad here is the next step as a part of that process, too.

What do you think? Please let me know what you think in the comment section or @mleis.

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Then, towards the end of the year, it hit me. I fell just a few flights short of getting status on United. So what was the point of taking all those flights on United? Giving one brand my loyalty throughout the year ended like a reverse jackpot. It’s incredibly disappointing and de-motivating to come up empty on recognition for that level of investment.

This all-or-none loyalty framework certainly isn’t unique to United. Many loyalty programs demand you save up points for long periods before they give you any token of preference or thanks. Until then it’s a steady parade of confirmation and survey emails, the latter again asking for me to fill out a form in the hope of winning a ton of points.

So why are loyalty programs turning more people off than on?

Christmas Clubs are Dead

Thinking about how all of these loyalty programs work, I wondered when they started. Very unscientifically, it feels like they came into being during the 1980’s (or that was the first time I remember them). This was in the last decade that Christmas Clubs were popular. And Christmas Clubs depended on an American culture that values putting a little bit in every week to enjoy something big, like a vacation or a big Christmas at the end of a long wait.

But our culture doesn’t work like this anymore. My colleague John Kenny likes to quote a statistic where, as a nation, we like to gamble about 20 billion dollars more than we save each year. We don’t want to defer gratification. We want an immediate result. Micro-lending is on the rise, and layaway is making a big comeback. These are both very focused and shorter-term investment or redemption schemes.

Make the Park Instead

Surely, no loyalty manager wants to think that their program tiers are only encouraging brand use among people who are already in its core, and discouraging anyone who is in the beginning of their relationship with that brand.

To achieve this conversion, I think it’s useful to use the park or central town square metaphor Dennis Schleicher introduced me to a while back. You want people to come into your square and make it a frequent destination: for hanging out, for the people that you meet there, or just go to watch.

But think about what makes a public park that people love: all the little things: the playground, the fountains and benches, the landscaping, the location, the bands or movies you invite to play there. And the ultimate test of the public space, as Dennis rightly suggested: that you see the occasional couple kissing.

In an era where we see Tripit, Mint, and Kayak make real ripples through industries by giving users something visual and valuable with every deposit of people’s time and effort, loyalty programs have the opportunity to become popular parks again with feedback and recognition at every point in the relationship.

To make a place so comfortable that you could even facilitate private moments that matter. Like Twitter’s Direct Messages, or Facebook private messaging and groups. These are the information equivalent of a couple kissing as they walk through, or sitting on a bench off to the side.

If loyalty doesn’t move more towards the model of making a pleasing community space that rewards and recognizes with every step, the “young audience not adopting” today will be the long lost brand equity of tomorrow.

What do you think? Please add your perspective here in the comments or @mleis.

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I’ve been going back and forth lately on the value of this word to people who may actually want to send this info out to their friends.

Would it be more effective to just have a few social network / email icons next to that content? Would a word like “post,” or phrase like “get opinions” take the actions from a person’s perspective more than the action that site wants you to take?

Just curious about where anyone else might be testing and seeing success in these areas.

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