Facebook’s IPO is just around the corner and the most popular post on the ExCapite blog is (Yes, you guessed it) Is the collapse of Facebook inevitable?.
But the idea I want to revisit today is how language shapes our ideas about innovation.
I want you to rethink what people are doing online. and,
I want you to do that by substituting the words Big Data, Social Media, Social Discovery, Social Influencers, Social Gurus and Social Sharing with the words Pheromones, Pheromedia, Pheroaming, Pheromonies, Pheromone Junkies and Pheromoning.
I say this because it is much easier to understand the vagaries of achieving ROI from our investment in social media when we begin to think of it in terms of spreading the scent rather than sharing the love.
Pheromones:
The big data being generated by users marking out their territory on the network.
Pheromedia:
Media designed to attract Pheromones (i.e. the marking of territory with Pheromones).
Pheroaming:
The conscious or subconscious activity of moving around the network with the objective to mark out territory with Pheromones.
Pheromoning:
The conscious or subconscious activity of marking out territory on the network with Pheromones.
Pheromonies:
Carriers of the high value digital scent (i.e. Pheromones) that attracts others to take a sniff and leave their own mark.
Pheromone Junkies:
Data scientists, management consultants and other industry experts/commentators who get high "sniffing" other people's Pheromones and/or discovering the hidden patterns in other people's Pheroaming activities.
In this context Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora and Google+ are Pheroaming platforms.
They make the activity of Pheroaming much easier simply because they allow you to track where others have been.
The act of clicking on a like, tweet, or share button is the act of Pheromoning.
Now consider this.
What if we have confused the activity of marking out our social territory for social sharing?
What if on the social network spraying is the signal and sharing is just noise?
What if, by clicking on the like button or the tweet button, we aren't actually choosing to share anything with the world other than the fact we have been here.
We have marked this content, this page, this brand, this identity, this celebrity, the influencer, this activity as ours?
Can you see how this simple idea.
That it is all about marking territory and not sharing.
Is the simplest explanation of why online influence doesn't translate into downstream traffic?
How likes, tweets and shares don't translate into downstream traffic?
Can you see what that insight tells us about the inefficiency of social media as a direct marketing platform?
Why the global social media "Browse with us, Buy from them" direct marketing sales funnel fails to translate all that traffic into customers?
Can you see the fundamental shift in thinking that is required by the advertising and marketing community to begin to comprehend what that means?
As the marketing manager you are happily counting likes and tweets as tokens of affection.
Veritable virtual love marks to be shared with others.
When in actual fact what your audience is really doing is spraying your brand with virtual pheromones and claiming it as part of their virtual territory.
You are looking to be shared, liked and loved.
While your audience is simply looking to leave a mark before they move on in their never ending journey to mark out their online territory.
Today Brands are literally paying to be sprayed.
What about tomorrow?
Post Script Winter 2020
It’s been 8 years since Facebook’s IPO and yes, marketing managers the world over are still 'paying to be sprayed'.
But let’s move on.
Let’s extend these ideas into the world of investing in innovation
Three years ago I ran a simulation comparing VC investing to placing bets at the casino (See A random walk in the land of Venture Capital)
It generated a statistical proof that venture capital investing was no more efficient than random selection at the roulette table
Although the model was compelling it was the wrong model for mapping and simulating VC behaviour… Why?, because VC investment is better understood as contagion (See Impact of syndication on VC portfolio performance)
Having spent the past decade observing VC and Angel Investors in action it was clear the VCs invest in much the same way that people share posts and likes on social media
So if we rethink Unicorns as Pheromedia, investment rounds as opportunities for VCs to mark their territory by Pheromoning, the rock star VCs as Pheromonies we see a familiar emergent biological pattern emerge from all the random chaos of the startup investment world
We begin to understand the actions of venture capitals, not as intelligent actors, but as a pack of useful idiots spraying and praying, busy in their days sniffing out where others have been and instinctively marking out this shared territory…
Basically a familiar pattern of ‘I do it because they do it’
and, if we model this behaviour and bundle it up into an AI algorithm then… well you’ve guessed the rest
This then was the trigger for building the Wealthy Tiger… and yes, we are still looking for investors clever enough to grasp the implications of this paradigm shift in investing in tomorrow