Celebrity and Story: Marketing at the Intersection of Fantasy

Several years ago while I was riding my bicycle up a lot of hills, I changed the inner chain ring on my bike from a 30-tooth gear to a 28-tooth gear. This makes it easier to pedal up hills. In the days leading up to installing it and actually riding, I had dreams of effortlessly pedaling up mountains. Not just sleeping dreams -- my idle moments were often filled with fantasies of easily spinning through the steepest sections of Old La Honda. Of course, that first time when I actually road up Old La Honda with my new chain ring, reality came crashing in -- climbing the hill was work. It was still work with 28-teeth, and when your body and your mind are loaded with physical labor, it's really not possible to say whether it's easier or not -- it just feels like work. This is reality.

Sales and marketing is all about selling the dream. It's about connecting with the customer's imagination and helping them live their fantasy. It's the customer, imagining themselves in that new car, enjoying the road. It's them walking into the casino, feeling like James Bond on his way to the Baccarat table. It's them, gloriously unifying their global business and solving all of it's communication problems with a single piece of enterprise software.

People don't dream about features and specifications. Sure, I was dreaming about a chainring with 2 less teeth, but I wasn't dreaming about teeth. People don't dream about two more megapixels; instead, they're more likely imagining clearer pictures or capturing more image detail. While they may fixate on 2GB more RAM, what they are probably imagining is a faster system and not waiting for screens to load or things to process.

At the same time, a powerful fantasy has roots in reality to help make it tangible. Try selling someone on the idea that the system is faster or the camera takes better pictures without giving them a reason why, and they'll have trouble connecting with it. That specification provides an anchor for the fantasy, something to tell them that this can be real, that this is not simply a fantasy. Features and the believability of a fantasy are closely related, and it's why it often helps to attribute benefits to a branded terminology.

The Celebrity Narrative
As I mentioned in my previous post on celebrity and story, most of what we imagine that we know about celebrities springs from the characters that they've portrayed. Perhaps you fell in love with Kate Hudson in Almost Famous or Natalie Portman in Garden State. While we all know that in real life these actresses may not be anything like the characters that they portrayed, our understanding of the actress is filtered through a lens of that character. So when we see pictures of Kate Hudson or read interviews with Natalie Portman, we focus on the parts that reinforce our expectations that the actress and the character are the same. We forge our archetypical hero.

The entertainment industry understands how powerful this fantasy engine is, so it directs a lot of effort into reinforcing these fantasy structures. That's why actors and actresses are often cast in roles that echo characters that they've portrayed in the past. Everyone knows the word typecasting, but we always usually think of it in terms of the limitations to an actor's career -- we don't usually think of it as a branded narrative.

Some of these narratives are so powerfully entrenched that they become intertwined with the celebrity. Take the recent example of Harrison Ford at Comic Con -- he can't escape his Han Solo / Indiana Jones narrative. Sure, he's acted in many other movies and played many other roles, but many public expectations of him revolve around that narrative center.

Selling the Dream
At the end of the day, if your product or service doesn't connect with an audience and inspire them to dream, you are going to have a hard time selling. In some ways, your role as a marketer is about finding the dreams, understanding the fantasies, and reinforcing them. But this is not just attention-grabbing image we're talking about -- this is about the deeper elements of the narrative. It's not just features. It's not just fantasy. It's the intersection of the two. Something that seems both impossible and plausible at the same time, a reality that is just a couple of simple steps away.

F Those Guys: LinkedIn Markets by Inciting a Riot

In the past two weeks, I've had to answer five different rounds of questions about a Linked In "Company page". When I say five different rounds, that's essentially questions about the same topic, repeated five times in five different ways from five different people. Well, truth be told, one of those was the same person relaying a stream of conscious question that was about the same topic but raised in a slightly different way.

For your average moronic observer (like the guy who raised the question twice), it's a simple question of WTF, this area is hot, people are submitting inquiries, there is interest, WHY AREN'T WE DOING SOMETHING?!?  Meanwhile, you and I, we're trained marketing pros -- we're sitting back, glassy eyed thinking, "what is this about"?

Linked In's company page feature is not new. It's similar to company pages on Facebook. It's a dynamically created page assembled from their database based on people selecting that company as where they work. From there, the page can be expanded with supplemental content. All well and good. Linked In also enables people who register with a company domain email address to become 'Admins' for the page. This ad hoc approach to administration is not new either, but it does raise important things to consider about who is publishing your company data and on which sites. If your company chooses not publish on Facebook or Linked In, should you have to monitor these types of sites that enable ad hoc administration and publishing?

But my real concern with Linked In's company page is that their product section. If you don't have products listed, they have a link that allows you to send a message to the company to let them know that you'd like to see their products and services listed on the page. This is the source of my recent round of WTF emails.

Essentially, Linked In wants to incite their visitors to shame our business into building content for their site.

So, as a marketing pro, the question that you have to ask is who is the audience for this and how do they use this content? How is it different from content that they have elsewhere? And why should we have to add content to their site when they could simply link to our web site?

While I understand using Linked In to help with hiring or to research social relationships in a business, I'm at a loss to understand how putting information about our products and services on their site is supposed to help our business -- unless our business is recruiting or sales consulting.

The Shame Engine
The really stupid part of this Linked In issue is the whole "send a message" aspect of this. Let's call it a shame engine. Essentially, it's similar to social shaming apps that try to drive behavioral change by socially publishing information about what you do so that you'll feel obligated to behave differently that might otherwise. Of course, it's one thing when you choose to use one of these things, it's another when you are simply subjected to it. That's kind of a dick move.

But using a Shame Engine is not limited to Linked In. Microsoft recently released an app for Windows Phone users called "Where's my App?". The app is supposed to help Windows Phone users find apps that are similar to software that's available on iOS or Android. But if you can't find a Windows Phone version of the app, it allows you to "send requests to app developers, encouraging them to develop for Windows Phone".

Ultimately, I think that attempting to leverage this approach against a business in this way is a significant marketing misstep for company using it. For Microsoft, it smells of desperation. With Linked In, there has always been sense of skeptical discontent inside the corporate firewall -- this is likely to push policies on restricted use.

Celebrity, Image & Story: On Lainey, Gossip, and Branding

It is with a touch of reluctant embarrassment that I must confess... that I often find myself reading certain celebrity gossip blogs.

It's not that I find the lives of celebrities that interesting. In my early years in the corporate world, I started reading through the entertainment news in order to expand my awareness of pop-culture topics -- basic research into the things that the people in the office seemed to be interested in. Now I think of it as light reading to build your marketing vocabulary -- without some pop-culture awareness, it can really be a struggle to communicate across generations. Left to my own interests, my cultural vocabulary would be even more alien and disconnected than it was 20 years ago. 

Perhaps now, as you read this, you're thinking that it's just me, my dirty little secret. In reality though, an interest in celebrity is everyone's dirty little secret. But rather than just me providing an explanation, here's Elaine Lui, Lainey from Lainey Gossip, with her TED talk The Sociology of Gossip (here's an amusing profile of Lainey). If her presentation doesn't sell you on why you should consider reading her blog -- or at least not feel guilty about your interest in gossip -- let me connect a few more dots for you.

First, let's start by looking at the entertainment industry as Lainey relates aspects of it in her TED presentation. Behind the celebrities there are a host of publicists and programs, all designed around marketing an image, a brand, a project, or a media product. The entertainment industry is PR, advertising and promotion every day, 24 hours a day. It's a story that is also business, full of messaging strategies that succeed and true tales of tragic messaging failures.

From a business perspective, a perfect current events example might be the story of Paula Deen. From her ascent, to her food and her brand identity, Paula Deen rose through the Food Network promotional engine to become a significant national brand. While the style of food that she promoted wasn't particularly healthy, her brand image was used by a number of businesses to endorse their products. When it came out publicly that she had diabetes, it was a problematic PR moment, a speed bump for the brand, but it didn't cause the entire brand to collapse. Likeable and homey image continued to sell. Until the more recent revelations of her 'racial' past when the brand suffered a catastrophic shot and the endorsement deals began to collapse.

On Lainey Gossip, Lainey sometimes refers to the idea of the school for "celebrity studies". They've also put together several "career prospectus" pieces that take a look at specific actors, their image and their entertainment business activities, then speculate about their career and possibilities. Celebrities and their image are wrapped in story. Take Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the stars of the Twilight series. The gossip blogs (and perhaps the promotion arm of the movie franchise) built them out to be a couple. Demographically speaking, it was very popular with their fan base. At the same time, other gossip blogs characterized the relationship as fake, a PR construction to help promote the films. Then there was the "affair" prior to the release of the final installment and the controversy that surround that. On one level, there is the story. On the other level, there are the questions that should be running through your mind as a marketing pro -- how much of this is manufactured? How is it shaped? What are the elements that work effectively and why?

The Illusion of Brand Identity
Brand is a story. It is an illusion. It's the conceptual framework that makes something seem special or more unique than something else. Paula Deen's brand was a friendly, down-home, comfort-food image. But how about the real Paula Deen behind that image? What is she really like? Perhaps the court depositions and the racist phrases are closer to reality -- or maybe they aren't. In reality, it doesn't really matter whether they are true or not; rather, that they had enough energy in them to change the narrative, to shift our perception of the story. At the end of the day, do we really know Paula Deen any better or do we simply have new brand story, a new image wrapper?

Perhaps because it is such an integral part of their business, the entertainment industry understands how important narrative is to celebrity and brand. Whether it's a crafted persona for an action hero actor, fake relationships or controversies and meta-news, a broad range of techniques and practices are used to increase visibility and awareness. Sometimes they are used to mask product aspects, like the straight publicity relationship of the gay actor, while sometimes they are simple promotion devices designed to raise visibilty -- like the 'leaked' nude sex tape.

But what is really interesting, and Lainey addresses aspects of this in her TED presentation, isn't just the details or the execution, it's the story outside of the story. This larger story framework, the narrative that encompasses the details, is the story of culture. It's a cross-section of demographic beliefs and expectations, of social values. This is the story that we want to believe.

Every day we willingly consume a diet of lies, half-truths and illusions, all with the purpose of supporting an existing internal narrative. We romanticize actors and actresses, idolizing their mythical persona with no real connection to the actual person in that role. And whether it's a carefully managed media or simply a case of selective hearing, we only absorb the things that support our narrative.

Take the story of Lance Armstrong and professional cycling. For whatever reason, we imagine that we know and understand the world of bicycle racing. It starts with the narrative that we know -- individuals, teams, and equipment, with the story of the event taking place through a snapshot of one or two hours of video clips. We build a framework of characters, personalities like Lance Armstrong, who we imagine we know. As we watch the race clips, our character, Lance Armstrong, acts and performs in expected ways. When we read interviews, he says the same kind of things. Even his books support the character that we know. And, as we watch him perform in the video race clips, we imagine that there is a competitive event taking place. We gloss over the business, the traveling theater being orchestrated around a cast of hundreds of paid performers and a media infrastructure that helps sell the show.

But we don't really know what it's like behind the surface of the illusion. We don't know what it feels like to get up in the morning with sore knees and a sore butt and a 100+ mile race day to look forward to. We don't know what it's like to work in a job where your performance is on display, when you're told to ride hard at this point or go slow at another point. We imagine the world of performance enhancing substances to be one like Popeye eating spinach magically crushing his competition, and not a standard part of the day-in-day-out body maintenance for performers that play the contenders. We imagine a lot but there is so much more that we really don't know. Was Lance Armstrong a rule breaker or a legendary figure-head an industry? Did he play the role that he did, say the things that he said, solely for personal gain or was that his job supporting the business, the industry? Dots of information from the media machine allow us to imagine much, but we really know very little.

Imagination + Fame = Tremendous Value Multiplier
In the world of infomercials, we're familiar with seeing the product that slices, dices and makes julienne fries, but the real sell comes when we start imagining how we would use the product. In that moment, the product has become real in a very special way inside your mind. In your head, the product moves into an idealized version of reality and plays a role in the narrative that you construct.  In that same way, 'celebrity' connects with the imagination part of your brain.

One of the things that I found rather amusing when I first came across the Lainey Gossip site was Lainey's 'Freebie 5'. Here's the basic description:

A concept inspired by Friends which I’ve called the Freebie Five - a list of 5 'unattainables' you’d have permission to tap without consequence from your significant other should the opportunity arise. The key to the Freebie Five is fantasy, whatever turns your crank. My criteria, however, is also determined by celebrity. Two bit no-names, no matter how hot they are, don’t rank. Because while intelligence is optional, fame never is.

While I'd never heard of it prior to finding her site, I've since found references to the same core idea in other areas that suggest that the basic theme is more common than you might think.

But, over time, one the thing that you'll notice as you read Lainey discussing her list, is how it changes and shifts, often centered around events or movies or public activities. Across a broader cross-section of people, you'll also find celebrities who capture the spotlight, only to see that spotlight fade from the public interest some time later. We all know the idea of 15 minutes of fame. But why is it that excitement from the attention rises and falls? Why is it that someone can appear on the list despite little, if any, direct knowledge of the person -- no idea whether they smoke, whether they smell bad, or whether you can share a conversation with them.

The reality is that we aren't enamored with the actor or actress, we are excited by the story. When Lainey is crushing on Robert Downey Jr., it's not the person, it's the media presence. It's a persona assembled in her mind from bits and pieces like Ironman, red carpet events, interviews and stories. It's a idealized character that doesn't include the ugly bits of reality that we all carry in real life like snoring, garlic-breath, or whether we remembered to put the toilet seat down.

We need to build these stories. We look for the pieces to construct our world. It's part of the reason why Playboy needs to include the Playmate profile, so that you have the framework to connect the photos and the image to a character, to make it human in your imagination. It's a lot like the perceptual processes that take place with change blindness and the invisible gorilla -- taking the perceptual moments and building them into something that seems tangible and coherent.

Celebrity, Modern Mythology and The Hero with A Thousand Faces
In his works on mythology, Joseph Campbell explores the idea of the monomyth, the hero's journey, a basic pattern that is found in many narratives from around the world. Campbell held that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental structures and stages, which he summarized in The Hero with a Thousand Faces as "The Hero's Journey". While the structure of the monomyth exists in many books and movies today, the same kind of concept can be more broadly applied to celebrity gossip and popular culture. Examples of this can be found in some of the themes explored on Lainey's blog, aspects like celebrity relationships, motherhood, career strategies and public appearances.

As you watch the tides of celebrity day to day, what you can see is that these themes are more than just the minutia of life in the spotlight, they are often components in a media strategy, carefully played in order to paint the dots in a larger narrative. Some, like the announcement of Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy, are masterfully managed, while others can be seen as blundering media missteps. Others, like the efforts to address the media after photos of Kristen Stewart and Rupert Sanders were published, were not so well managed. Sometimes, celebrities shape a story and it resonates. Other times it fails.

Here is a great post on Jessica Biel posting a photo on Twitter before the Met Gala. Essentially, Jessica Biel published an image of herself getting dressed and talks about having a tough time zipping her dress. As Lainey summarizes sarcastically, "Jessica Biel, she’s just like us! She has dress and zipper problems too!" From a messaging standpoint, Biel has attempted to shape audience perception of her, but her message didn't align well with her existing narrative. Minutia, yes, but it's an equally important reminder about message -- imagine if Larry Ellison tweeted images of himself putting gas in an SUV and complaining about $4 per gallon gas.

At the same time, there's another media at work here. The Biel image was posted on her celebrity blog site. While Lainey picked it up and commented on it unfavorably, it's possible that there is another audience in the general population, fans that follow her, that go to her site. An audience where this message resonates. Traditional celebrity gossip was subject to the filter of publications and media outlets. Now, the celebrity is able to reach out to their audience and connect directly.

This actually underscores an important change that has been taking place with the increasing importance of social media. While most of us could probably care less about the relationship between the two leads in the Twilight movies, the series built a particularly rabid fanbase, commonly referred to as Twi-hards. More than just passive fans, this audience channels their energy into aggressively communicating their expectations for the narrative back to the studios, the media outlets and the broader public. They campaign like a media tsunami. Here's an example. But, perhaps more important than this type of audience behavior, is the impact that it has on the narrative. Did Kristen Steward and Robert Pattinson get back together because they romantically reconnected or because their Twi-hard fan base demanded that their relationship hold through the final movie? And if it conflicted with their personal values, how much pressure did the studio put on them?

But This Is Business. Who Cares About Celebrity?
We all want to imagine celebrity as this mythical cast, performing in a pantheon of media and activity that is removed from our real world. In that same way, when people encounter celebrities, they are often interested in taking pictures, getting autographs, and documenting their encounters with their legendary figures. Celebrity is also relative. Your CEO may be a celebrity in your business, but virtually unrecognized outside of your company. Many Silicon Valley people might recognize Marissa Mayer, Mark Benioff, or Eric Schmidt, but how many people outside of the business world would recognize their names or know if that sat next to them on a flight?

At the same time, celebrity is a valuable commodity. Notoriety can help you command a larger salary, be hunted by recruiters, or have your opinion be considered. While lots of friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or people in your LinkedIn network may not be a real measure of friendship, it does speak to some measure of communication influence. It is a measure of celebrity. How often to people turn to you for answers at work? How highly do the people that work with you in your industry regard you? You, the influencer -- this is an aspect of celebrity.

Celebrity is related to your personal brand. Your celebrity status is about who you are, how you promote yourself, and the narrative that people use to understand you. This is possibly the bigger lesson to understand from celebrity studies -- that the way people understand you, that the way they think of you is, essentially, a story. That story is a synthesis of who you are, and the role that you play in the narrative of the encounters that they have with you. Maybe it's your handshake, or when you talked about restaurants, golf, or wine. Maybe it's your cluttered desk, or the phone conversations with your girlfriend that everyone can't help but overhear.

Are you painting narrative dots that increase your celebrity status or making you seem like a trainwreck? Do you seem genuine in your interaction with others, like the stories of Robert Downey Jr., or do you seem nice when the cameras are on but hiding a mean, unpleasant personality like Reese Witherspoon's recent public drunkenness arrest in Georgia.

The Story and the Narrative Dragon
Here's something even more important to understand -- sometimes the narrative takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes you can't control the story, you are simply subject to the effects of being blown around by it. Take this example from the story of Sean Parker's wedding. Here, the story of his wedding started to catch fire as a story published by another media outlet. In several places, the Internet celebrity has attempted to change the narrative, to explain the events and shift the story away from "Sean Parker, anti-hero, eco-wrecker, redwood crusher and all around bad guy". What's more, while this story grew into a media storm, it started with an attempt to keep it private. According to Parker,

We chose a setting for our wedding that was a literal expression of our search for sanctuary — a place that was safe, private, and intimate. We chose a remote location (Big Sur), invited no press, and did our best to conceal that location from the press. We didn’t court attention — quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door and we didn’t sell our photos to tabloids.

And yet, the story blew up. What may have started as the simple story of an ultimate nerd fantasy wedding,

a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to force 364 otherwise self-respecting adults to dress up in elaborate fantasy-inspired costumes, a feat of mischief that we were delighted to attempt. The Academy Award winning costume designer (for “Lord of the Rings”), Ngila Dickson, was our co-conspirator, and her brilliant designs exceeded even our wildest dreams.

transformed into a media dragon, a narrative monster. Here's how he describes what he took away from the experience:

The biggest mistake we made in wedding planning was forgetting about the media: that silent, invisible dragon breathing down our necks all along. Nothing has been more shocking to me than the media’s handling of this “controversy”: there were hundreds of articles written, and yet — incredibly — there was only one reporter who bothered to ask us for comment prior to publishing their story.

It's a story of dots, of tidbits crafted into a narrative. As noted earlier, we don't know the reality, we assemble a story from the pieces that we have available. In his critique of the media near the end of the piece, Parker talks about how, "social media has collapsed the traditional media roles of content producer, editor, publisher, and consumer into one and assigned those roles to literally everyone". This also holds true for what it means to be a celebrity, a public figure. As Parker notes, "the more we depend on social networks and other online services to share content with friends and family, the more we risk that our content inadvertently becomes public."

Ultimately, that's why you need to see yourself in terms of your brand, to understand yourself in terms of a media strategy. Because as much as people may want to imagine a world where our private life is not exposed or struggle to understand why Kim Kardashian is seen as a celebrity, this is our modern media. This is our modern reality. Sometimes you control the story. Sometimes, one little narrative dot can change the story and the story controls you.

Wrapping it up
If you've made it to the end of this long post, I hope that one of the take-aways has been an increased understanding of some of the interesting aspects of the celebrity industry. And, while it may feel a bit embarrassing to admit to reading about celebrity, you don't have to think lesser of yourself for it. If you do follow it and spend some time reflecting on the processes, themes, and aspects outside of the specific individuals, I think that you'll find yourself in a far better position to market in the modern world of social media. And should you become famous, you may want to keep these celebrity behavior tips in mind.

Tiered Systems Suck: Lessons from Airline Customer Satisfaction

This morning I came across this article on Airline customer satisfaction, Airline satisfaction: below post office, above subscription TV. On the one hand, this comes as no surprise to anyone -- airline customer service scores have been terrible for years and, for most of us, there is a long list of painfully unpleasant events that rank above interaction with an airline. I suspect that if you could get across the country in four or five hours traveling by sewer, there would be a line of people opting for that instead of going through the airport.

But the interesting little tidbit in this article is the contrast between the customer satisfaction scores for Southwest Airlines and JetBlue compared to the other major carriers.

Low-cost carriers JetBlue Airways and Southwest Airlines led the industry with scores of 83 and 81, respectively; network airlines Delta, United, American and US Airways rated no better than 68, the survey found.

Now you can deconstruct these results in a lot of ways. You could wonder whether the results are shaped by the volume of traffic that the airline handles, or perhaps the demographic of the passenger. -- if travelers on JetBlue and Southwest are typically infrequent travelers that opted for the airline based on the low cost profile, they may have lower expectations for the results.

Fundamentally though, I think that there is a very different philosophy at play that makes a strong contribution to the contrasting perceptions -- the way that they view the customer. Both JetBlue and Southwest treat the passengers in their system equally. There is no first class. While JetBlue offers a pay-to-upgrade option for extra leg room, the default for both airlines is that all flyers are treated equally.

It's just a tiny variation in the business philosophy, but consider the implications of that difference. On Southwest or JetBlue, everyone on the flight is part of a community. You are equal citizens. When something goes wrong, you don't expect that there is some hidden intent at injustice based on the class of your ticket. Any perks you are awarded are likely equally available to everyone else and potentially available for a small fee.

Contrast that with the tiered service on the other carriers. From serving meals to people in first class to the cramped, unpleasant seats at the back of the plane, if you found yourself stuck in the lower priced ticket options on one of the major carriers, you are treated -- poorly isn't really the right word because it's worse than that; it's more of like testing the limits of human tolerance. Would you be willing to sit in this tiny space for four hours for $50? How about fitting all of your stuff into a carry-on for $50? Can you go without food for four hours for $200? It's kind of depraved and, when your in the system, everything is a reminder of that reality. The major carriers may try customer-service-oriented messaging, but for the majority of people on the plane or interacting with their system, it sounds disingenuous.

Airline customer satisfaction is similar to broader problems with the inequality inherent in the austerity programs. While 'belt tightening' may appear to be equitable to someone looking through the rose-tinted lens of first class, 'equally distributed' has a much larger impact when the standard for economy treatment dances with the definition of humane. Perhaps the biggest difference is that, while I find myself increasingly choosing airlines like Southwest and JetBlue, people in the main cabin class of an economy have no alternative carriers available.

If there is a take-away from these airline customer satisfaction numbers, it should be a reminder about the positioning of options in your product offering. Rather than differentiating products by crippling essential features and making lesser products unappealing, it's probably better to determine a base level service that meets the broad range of customer needs and wow your that base of customers with an amazing product.

Data, Relationships and Story: Marketing and NSA Monitoring

As the Snowden data monitoring story continues to live in the news, one theme that gets a lot of visibility is whether or not, by providing public visibility to these programs, he has exposed the secret inner-workings of a spying infrastructure, and that by exposing that, he has somehow weakened the protections it provides -- or provided, as the case may be.

On one level, this story sounds like yet another one of those Internet privacy stories -- Facebook is watching you online, Google is reading your email, or your computer may actually be a zombie in a bot net. For much of the technology-challenged world, the headline embodies all of the frightening possibility of a campfire ghost story. But, as with other big stories with complexity and depth, this story is far more nuanced than a simple black and white, right and wrong.

The reality is that we live in a data driven world. From the moment you turn on a device and it connects to a network, there is an electronic discussion that takes place. Some of the communications may be innocuous, like a device handshake with the network to give it identity or your computer asking a server what time it is. Or when you pull up a web page in your browser, your computer talks to a server that then sends back the data that your computer needs to build a web page. In the process of sending you data, that server may verify who you are, then call a bunch of it's friends, tell them your name, and ask them to send you data as well. And in a world full of servers and electronic logs, each of these transactions is logged in journals, and your history in each may affect the other.

This is the electronic ecosystem. Fundamentally, some of these things need to work like this in order for things to operate. Below the web sessions or the phone calls, the core back and forth of devices and interacting requires identity, memory and structure.

Anonymity on a network is not true anonymity, what it really is is a disconnect between identities. In the brick and mortar world, it is possible to have essentially anonymous transactions. You can have a conversation with another person in an isolated room. You can go to a store in a different area and purchase something in cash. But electronic transactions are different. Each electronic communication is like a phone call from one location to another. Electronic payments are essentially promises to transfer funds with a number used to identify the person writing the IOU. While we might want to imagine electronic activities conforming to the realities of our experiential world, they don't. This can have both costs and benefits.

Logs, Logs Everywhere - In Pursuit of Real Identity
Web marketers have long known that, while it's interesting to see what pages people visit, it can be even more interesting if you know where somebody came from and where they go after they visit your site. Is this someone interested in your product? Are they comparing your product to a competitive one? Have they been to your site multiple times? This is the type of data that can be extracted from a simple cross-site tracking cookie. Within that, typically, we try to weave together a tapestry of data points. Can we get the visitor to complete a form and give us some identity or contact info? Did they download files?

In it's simplest way, these are elements that can be tracked from a basic web log on one site. Or, using something like Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot, tracked across multiple sites and marketing deliverables. As marketers, we look for every bit of data that we can get, every touch point, in an effort to build an identity. We want to invest all of our selling resources into the process of converting that potential customer into revenue.

And yet, for all of our efforts, our tracking and our analysis, our best efforts are still just a sketch. Our simple tracking can easily be fooled by someone doing research at home, then going into the office or maybe using a different email address.

This problem of identity has always been an aspect of the web that's been both celebrated and loathed. While we're happy to be 'anonymous' when we're looking at things we might not want people to know about -- competitor's web sites, job listings, embarrassing medical conditions or even online porn -- anyone who has been in a chat room, a forum or the comments section of a blog knows the evil of anonymous trolls posting irrelevant or hateful comments. Real identity is often a thematic solution for these issues, sort of a, "you wouldn't post that if everyone knew who you were" approach.

But in that way, you can see where a government program that reaches across services and joins the various data streams is not particularly mind-blowing in terms of technical scope. For an organization like the NSA, being able to sort through different emails and identify that even though the email address for crazy voice in the alt.discussion.terrorist-bombing-plans isn't the same one as the guy who just ordered 10 pressure cookers on Amazon.com, and even though one uses Gmail and the other uses Yahoo, they both actually originate from the same IP address.

Crafting Persona and The Importance of Story
If you were to look at your typical web site log, what you have is a series of events. Data points. But they are nothing without a story. Consider a typical goal path through your web site ending in someone filling out a registration form and downloading an electronic asset. If you have 100 people visiting the page with the registration form but only 50 downloading the file, you need to build a story that explains the two pools. For those that didn't download, maybe the form was too long. Maybe they just wanted to see browse. Maybe they were competitors.

While it may seem like an arbitrary process and difficult to imagine, we actually do this all time in real life -- it's how we build an understanding of events. Think about when you're driving and you see another car use a turn signal. In simple terms, it's a directional indicator, a single data point that tells you that this car is planning to shift in that direction. But, in order to really understand what they intend to do, you need to put it into context of a larger story.

• Do they intend to change lanes?
• Are they planning to exit the freeway?
• Are they making a turn?
• Did they forget their blinker and are driving down the road with their turn signal on?

That same story framework helps make sense of traffic patterns -- in the morning, there are a lot of cars trying to get off at this exit -- and creates stress when people behave unusually: Why is this person driving 20mph in a 45mph zone? Why are they shifting across three lanes now? While driving has a reality framework that makes it relatively easy to map cognitively, ultimately, you are still making guesses about what's going on in the other car, about what's going on in the engine inside the other driver's head. We analyze and we predict, but we don't know.

Understanding can be particularly challenging when you're looking at similar behaviors. Is this person weaving because they are drunk, dialing on their cell phone, or just being buffeted by crosswinds? In this context, one might be an ongoing threat, one a short term threat, and the other a broad-scale operational concern.

Building a story about online activity requires a much broader understanding of the landscape that the person is interacting in. Imagine the example of a single data point in your own system log, one where your system connected to an IP address in China. When your system connected to a server in China, did it go there because you loaded a web page with an ad network that pulled a file or a script from a server there? Did it connect there because your system has some advertising or tracking cookies on it from a previous visit? Did it go there because your system has malware running and it's compromised? Or did it just connect there because you're running Skype and there's a peer-to-peer link that connected there? Without having a broader tapestry of the transaction, this single data point is unintelligible.

Story and Data Correlation
In real life face-to-face interaction, understanding what's inside of someone's head can be difficult. It's potentially more problematic using electronic data. Even with a broad set of data points, algorithmically understanding intent and motivation often fall short. Consider Amazon. A visit to Amazon will get you follow-up emails with pricing deals on the things that you looked at. While this type of remarketing has higher clickthroughs than other programs, how often does it feel like you're being spammed? And, when those items that you searched appear on your 'My Amazon' page, how often do they actually help you get to the thing that you were interested in? On the marketer's side of the equation, that value is greater than zero so it counts as a win, but on you, the customer's side, it's far from a perfect match. If just having lots of personal tracking data was a slam dunk for understanding motivation, Facebook's advertising programs would be far more effective.

Ultimately, our story constructions are shaped by a variation of A/B testing and validation. First, there is the story, the hypothesis -- since this guy just activated his turn signal, I think he's going to exit the freeway. Next, we have the test -- does he get off at the exit? Once we've completed the test, we now have to evaluate the results and reinterpret our story.
Observations about data -- like the correlation between purchasing habits and pregnancy -- don't just bubble up from the data. They require a hypothesis and a framework for analysis. Consider this great article, In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal, in the New York Times interviewing Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google. In the interview, Bock talks about some of the practices that Google used during the hiring process, and how well they correlated to their actual job performance. Essentially, he shoots down the value of famous Google practices like 'brain teasers' and asking all candidates for their GPA (I know what you're thinking, tell me something I didn't already know). Keep in mind, before they could evaluate this to see if it actually correlated to performance, somebody came up with the hypothesis that these things mattered. Google wanted to hire the smartest, best employees, so they defined a hypothetical profile of what those people should look like, then ran interview screening processes based on those. It's only after years of running this experiment that we see their hypothesis is being shot down.

Secrets, Lies, and the World of Cyberspying
Arguably, the most sensitive point in this whole Snowden story surrounds the secret, classified nature of the programs. Admittedly, it's difficult to measure a secret program. On the one hand, you have this big reveal that the government monitors electronic communications and activities, the great NSA version of Eloqua. Yawn. On the other hand, you have the government claiming that it is a national secret and officials saying that they didn't monitor communications.

The government's interest in having access to this kind of data is not new. While it seems like a rather simplistic idea now, remember the clipper chip? This was basically the government saying we can help American businesses with encryption, but we'll keep a key to the back door open so that we can monitor the bad guys using it. After the Bush-era telecom monitoring stories, are you really surprised that the government has an ear on the Internet and is hoovering up your electronic communications?

At the same time, remember the environment that you live in. There are malware exploits out there in the wild that allow non-government entities to monitor your computer, log your keystrokes, even turn on the camera and microphone in your computer -- some criminal or 15-year old pervert could be watching you through your laptop as you read your morning email. There are foreign governments that have exploited your electronic systems to gather intelligence on you, on your business, and on your technology. And the other day, as you drove home chatting with your significant other, you actually broadcast all of those secrets over the radio. Admittedly, it was a cellular radio designed with controls to make it more secure and more private, but did you really think that it was equivalent to the two of you speaking intimately in your bedroom?

This is the reality of the environment that we live in. The fundamental nature of these technologies means that electronic data is available and it can be monitored. But just as in the real world where you're unlikely to physically prevent an armed police officer from entering into your house and searching your premises if he wants to force his way in -- saying "you can't come in" doesn't actually prevent a search. Instead, historically, we have opted to disincentivize forced entry behavior by making any evidence collected without a warrant be inadmissible in legal proceedings. With electronic data right now, we've essentially handing the review of this over to a secret process. Rather than simply handing over the decisions surrounding the implications of this to secret, hidden elements of the government, we need a more open discussion of the potential and the impact of these types of programs. We need to define a framework for what we establish and rights and protections in this modern data environment. Otherwise, what happens when the government starts sending you Target-like coupon books because you might be guilty of a thought-crime?

Again, the real problem here isn't the data, it's the application of the data and the potential for abuse. It's not the terrorist plots that you stop, it's what happens if you know what porn site Mitt Romney looked at. It's not just the government that you fear; instead, it's what happens if the non-profit that you work for finds out that you 'anonymously' publish a blog about your sex life. Or what will your neighbors think if you order birth control from an online pharmacy because your local pharmacist has moral reservations and doesn't fill those orders?

In the vast and expanding world of our digital breadcrumbs, we all have moments that would rather not share with our friends, our colleagues, or our government. In the court that governs shame and embarrassment, there is no way to disincentivize moral outrage. There is no statute of limitations. Whether you're Paula Deen, Lance Armstrong, or (one of my favorite controversies) Sasha Grey, the perception of who you are and what you stand for lives in a sliding scale world that changes over time. Sometimes that time period can be short, sometimes decades.

Our electronic data is a lot like our DNA. With the evolving understanding of DNA, increasingly we know more and more about a person from their DNA. We can understand their genealogy, we can diagnose what's wrong with them, and we can even make predictions about their future. This type of information is so powerful that, as a culture, we attempt to be very careful with the availability, distribution, and use of it. We fear -- and probably rightly so -- discrimination, exclusion, or a wide range of potential limitations to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Because we can imagine the dark potential inherent in all of this, we are cautious. In that same way, we need to approach our digital data in the same way. 

Late Night Mix Tape: We Want The Funk

Here's one that you might want to devote some watching and listening time to. This is Parliament-Funkadelic doing The Mothership Connection back in 1976. This runs over an hour, so you may just want to click through parts, but there's some great stuff here -- real live music, crazy costumes, pretty amusing.

XBox One - Celebrating Microsoft's Design Arrogance

As the news surrounding the XBox One comes pouring out of E3, the details of features and implementation on the platform are seeing some serious PR backlash and groundswell dissatisfaction among their existing XBox customer-base. From stomping on the used game market to the must-connect-and-phone-home once-per-day or the always on Kinect monitoring the room, Microsoft has implemented a lot of features that seem more closely aligned to the interests of Microsoft than those of their customers.

It's not uncommon for products to suffer a misstep or two at launch. For as much time and effort as is put into development, it's still difficult to interpret applied uses. And the are always bugs. But with the XBox One platform, it's difficult to envision a product that has done more to take aim at their existing market and customer base, line up their most sensitive parts, and fire not once, but multiple times. Full disclosure: the XBox game that I'm currently playing is a first person shooter.

Seriously though. Consider some of the design changes that have been implemented on the XBox One platform:

• While the XBox360 always tries to connect to XBox live when it's turned on and there is a network available, it will function without an Internet connection. Now the platform is being changed so that it won't work without phoning home? What problem does this solve for the user?
• While the XBox360 can operate without the Kinect and a user has the option to connect the Kinect or opt out, the XBox One will not operate without the Kinect, and the Kinect is always on. Was it really necessary to eliminate this option with the system? What problem does this solve for the user?
• While killing physical game media may simplify Microsoft's distribution network and reduce costs, killing the used game market essentially takes aim at long tail game market, gives it the finger, then fires both barrels. Again, what problem does this solve for the user? 

All in all, it sort of exemplifies that traditional Microsoft approach.

1. Start with 'what would be best for Microsoft'. 
2. Make it the standard on all of our stuff so that it only works this way, our way.
3. Tell everybody how awesome it is and how they are fools if they don't recognize the Microsoft genius.

Remember all of the various iterations of IE that worked their own way? And Silverlight? Or Microsoft's Java?

In that way, you kind of feel sorry for the businesses in the used game market. Like Microsoft's notebook and tablet partners with Surface, they are the latest ecosystem to get oops-ed upside their heads. Classic.

Opportunity Lost
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about XBox One is that it really was an anticipated platform. Microsoft really does have a strong foothold in the living room with the XBox360 console. XBox One could have been a contender. If they had simply made it a consumer friendly, not always-on-nanny-cam that worked with any media, they might not have alienated a huge chunk of their core.

What's more, most hardcore gamers will tell you that, while Kinect can be an amusing accessory, it doesn't really add to or improve their experience for the games that they play the most. It's more of a Wii-wannabe that's makes the platform more accessible for families -- anything but a "Must Have". In that way, must have, always on kind of spits in the eye of some of current platform's most passionate evangelists.

Some of these problematic features could be easily corrected, simply by making them optional. Imagine if they had kept Kinect as an accessory but did a "look what you can do with this" presentation. My guess is that, given the option and enough benefits from having always-on enabled, you would build a large base of users who ran that configuration.

In conclusion, here's a little thought for take-away. With many approaches to technology, there are trade-offs. But a lot of idea acceptance comes in the way something is framed. During some of their presentation materials, Microsoft reps talked about smart phones and always on connectivity. In that way, it's easy to think about the privacy that we give-up by opening geo-location features on our smart phones. But in asking people to adopt this, do we say:

• Imagine the power of being able to know exactly where you are?
• Then imagine if, when you are somewhere you don't know, the information was appropriate for that place -- like finding a nearby restaurant? If you open your geo-location information to Yelp, then they can help you when you're someplace you don't know.

Or do we say:

• Imagine if we knew where you were all the time? 

That is a truly frightening concept.