My visit to Occupy Boston
Yesterday, I paid a visit firsthand to Occupy Boston, the local branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’ve been writing and talking about economics and politics for a while and about the Occupy movement, so I figured it was time to do some primary, field research and go there myself. So what did I find?
First, the Occupy movement is certainly diverse. Take a look at this short, incomplete laundry list of issues:
- Corporate taxation
- CORI/Background Check Discrimination
- Workers’ Rights
- Violence
- Murders
- Gun Laws
- Foreclosures
- Political Corruption
- White Supremacy
- Disparities in Education
- Budget Cuts
- Racism
- Bank Bailouts
- Voter Fraud
- Affordable Housing
- Corporate Crime
- Fraud
- State/Individual Sovereignty
- Foreign Wars
- Religious Intolerance
- 9/11 Conspiracy Coverup
The criticism that the Occupy movement doesn’t stand for anything is patently false. The reality is, based on conversations I had and the piles of brochures and other things I was given by volunteers is that the Occupy movement stands for far too much, so much so that it doesn’t know what it is.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the movement completely lacks focus. With a laundry list of issues that long, there has to be some common ground. For example, people cited Arab Spring in conversation, but they neglected to realize that Arab Spring movements had a very clear set of targets: Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Qaddafi, etc. In each case, the target was the incumbent sovereign government that created conditions of structural inequality or injustice.
The second takeaway from Occupy? They’ve done a good job of identifying the problems (as you can see from the partial list above) that are totally valid and worth addressing. But because they have no common focus, no common ground, they also have no set of solutions to advocate for. Again, going back to Arab Spring, the common ground was clear: get rid of the guy in charge. I talked to two volunteers (who requested that I not reprint any identifying information) who, when asked how they’d solve the problems that Occupy is addressing, shrugged and said that they weren’t sure, but something had to be done.
A third volunteer said that we had to end corrupt government, end the power of corporations, and redistribute the wealth accrued by our corporate/government complex. When I gently suggested that that was the effective goal of communism, the gentleman I was talking to loudly protested, “I’m no goddamn communist. I’m a ****ing American!” I gave up at that point trying to explain that communism was an economic system, not a political one, and that communism can work on some scales and in some contexts. (Israeli kibbutzim are one such example of successful communism)
This is the third takeaway from the Occupy movement, one they’ve self-identified as an issue for their members. In order to more effectively articulate what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed, they need to get better educated about economics and politics. Of the five people I talked to, none had even a basic grasp of the difference between Keynesian and Austrian economics, which are the two effective viewpoints being promoted by various political sects today. For those not keeping score, the Democrats tend to lean more Keynesian, and the Republicans (especially Ron Paul’s ideological base) lean towards Austrian.
The bottom line for the Occupy movement is that it’s got a lot of energy. The people in it have their hearts in the right place as the political, economic, and social issues at the heart of the movement are very real. That said, it needs to get better educated and better marketed in order for it to resonate deeply with the average person and give them something to aim their discontent at.
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Old Klout scores vs. New Klout scores
I’m a bit of a data packrat. My hard drive is littered with piles of spreadsheets, CSV files, MySQL databases, and more, which comes in handy more often than you’d think. When Klout announced a major change to their algorithm on October 26, 2011, I knew I had to take a look and see how scores had changed – but I had to do it in a statistically valid way. I strive to avoid producing “studies” and “social media science” that would be labeled cringeworthy by folks like Tom Webster.
Luckily, I had a pool of old Klout data with original Twitter IDs from July laying around, so I was able to do a longitudinal study of Klout scores for the same set of IDs over time. Let’s see what changed.
Data disclosure: this pool of approximately 5,000 Twitter IDs was originally randomly chosen from my Twitter followers. My audience tends to skew towards marketing professionals, so bear that in mind – this audience is not representative of all Twitter users.
Here’s the basic line chart for old Klout scores:
Here’s the basic line chart for new Klout scores:
Take note that scores declined nearly linearly once you were past the short head in the old model. In the new model, there’s a change in inflection right around 35 or so, and then again around 15. Also take note that in Old Klout, scores could be as low as 1; in New Klout, scores bottom out at 10.
The change in the floor score impacts the normal distribution of scores pretty significantly. Here’s Old Klout as a normal distribution:
You can see the pile of low level 1 scores at the very left. Now the same for New Klout:
The pile of level 1s are now piled up with the level 10s on the left side. For data quality purposes, this makes it VERY hard to distinguish between what’s a crap account (the old level 1s, which was a good indicator of bots) and brand new people to Twitter (usually the old level 10s). This is very unfortunate in itself.
Second, it almost looks like Klout tried to balance active, influential folks in around 45 on the new chart. To show you the best illustration of this, let’s filter out all scores below 11 on both data sets so that you can see people with at least some activity and/or influence.
Old Klout:
New Klout:
Two things leap out: If you were above 45 in Old Klout, it looks like you might have gotten a downgrade. Second, look at the low end – a lot more people moved from the second quartile to the left side in the algorithm change.
So with all of these changes, is there a “good” Klout score in the new model for my dataset? In the old model that was activity based, anything above 15 was probably not too bad – active users of Twitter. In the new model, 15 is one of the break points, but right around 35 is where you see scores really pick up for this sample set. If I were looking for “influencers” in the new scoring model, I might want to start looking at scores of 35 and up.
GREAT BIG HUGE WARNING: Remember that this is a biased, non-representative sample. I am most assuredly NOT saying that you should run out and update all your social media marketing Powerpoint slides with a shiny new “35 or bust” bullet point. What I am saying is that Klout now appears to have two tiers in their data – lower influence in the 11-15 range and higher influence in the 35-50 range.
Does that mean you’re a social media failure if you have a Klout score below 35? No. It could mean you’re not going to get access to as many of the perks in their perks program, but that’s about it for consequences of a score under 35 as far as I can tell. Beyond that, keep doing everything that is a generally accepted best practice on Twitter: share interesting stuff, have real conversations, be human, etc.
Do Klout scores matter? In the old model, they were based on activity and could be gamed fairly easily. I don’t have enough data for the new model yet (working on that) to see what aspects of social media practice correlate less or more strongly with the score, so there’s no way to tell if their algorithm is an improvement or not for the purposes of judging who is influential. That means for now, they’re not any less or more accurate than they were before the update, so put as little or as much faith in them as you did before until we have better data.
For those folks who are data junkies, you are welcome to download the anonymized CSV files for these two datasets here:
Download Old Klout csv.
Download New Klout csv.
I’d love to hear about your conclusions in the comments.
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Do you know what is under the hood?
I’ve spent the last few evenings after logging off of World of Warcraft poking away at my new Linux box, which is running the 64 bit version of Fedora 15. What’s astonishing to me is how much the infrastructure pieces have changed since I last fully administered a Linux server at the command line level. So much of what used to be incredibly laborious, unpleasant compiling of software from source code has been happily reduced to sets of packages that are good enough to get the job done.
More important, the capabilities that come more or less out of the box now are vastly different than I remember. Take a look at just a few of the php packages I pulled out of the yum repository:
yum install php-ZendFramework.noarch php-PHPMailer.noarch php-cli.x86_64 php-eaccelerator.x86_64 php-email-address-validation.noarch php-fpdf.noarch php-gd.x86_64 php-mysql.x86_64 php-nusoap.noarch
Non-technical folks will look at that and completely gloss over, so let me break down the packages so you get a sense of what’s happening and why it’s important.
- php-ZendFramework.noarch: when up and running, this will make my blog MUCH faster than it currently is on a shared host
- php-PHPMailer.noarch: a powerful email library class that could, in combination with Amazon SES, let me become my own email service provider at very low cost
- php-cli.x86_64: who loves black screens with green letters? Me!
- php-eaccelerator.x86_64: In concert with the Zend framework, this will keep things speedier than ever.
- php-email-address-validation.noarch: all those email libraries I wrote years ago for validating email addresses have been superseded by one nice, compact library that will let me keep my mailing lists cleaner than ever
- php-fpdf.noarch: one-stop shopping for making PDFs on the fly at the webserver level. Imagine dynamic PDFs that are customized, generated whenever a user wants them! What’s amazing is that this capability used to cost hundreds of dollars just a few years ago. Now it’s free.
- php-gd.x86_64: the GD image library. I can make graphics on the fly, which is very useful for things like sign-makers and dynamic advertising systems.
- php-mysql.x86_64: enterprise database integration.
- php-nusoap.noarch: you know all those fancy web APIs that require tons of coding? The NuSOAP library makes that coding much less strenuous, which means I’ll be able to do more, faster, with services like Klout, EmpireAvenue, and the major social networks.
What’s amazing is that just a few years ago, you’d have to manually build these pieces from scratch, endure hours of testing, debugging, fixing dependencies, and more. Now you just type it all in one long command, and your webserver is ready to go. That means if you’re getting a Web 2.0 company up and running, it’s easier than ever and faster than ever to get up and running and be fully capable of doing business.
Here’s the most important takeaway from all of this: if you understand the underlying technologies that make up social media and digital marketing, you understand what capabilities and potential you do or do not have. If you don’t know what’s under the hood, you don’t really know what you’re driving. Even if you’re not a technologist, a developer, or an IT person, you should still have some passing familiarity with all of these pieces, because knowing what’s under the hood will let you know if you’re doing the technological equivalent of driving a Lamborghini Aventador (one of the top 10 fastest cars in the world) to the grocery store at 10 miles per hour, vastly underusing its potential.
Here’s a secondary takeaway: if you know what the pieces do, if you know that you have the potential to get them in place rapidly (even if you’re not a technologist), then you know what solutions you can provide. Here’s an example, the php-oauth.noarch package. You’ve heard of OAuth in the context of social media authentication and you use it every time you click a “Log in with Twitter” or “Sign in with Facebook” button. If you know this software package is available on your webserver for free, you now know you can do a lot more with OAuth applications, which in turn means you can offer more capabilities to your customers and clients for things like custom sign-in forms.
You don’t need to be a car mechanic to know what’s under the hood of what you drive. Likewise, you don’t need to be a developer or a systems administrator to at least have a sense of what your website is capable of. Take some time to learn the basics, ask your in-house IT staff (IT people love free food, so buy them lunch in exchange for a tour), and you’ll be in a much better position to know what you’re capable of.
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Unsolicited Review: Scrivener
Way back when I was writing Marketing White Belt, I wanted a better writing tool. Evernote was and is a wonderful tool for writing shorter content (like this blog post) but for managing very large documents, it can get unwieldy, even with folders and groups and notebooks. I started looking around for a better writing tool, and reviewed a whole bunch before stumbling across Scrivener from Literature and Latte Software.
Scrivener has a few things going for it that are deal-makers for me, the things that made me shell out $45 for it.
1. Export to Kindle and Nook. Formatting eBooks for sale on Amazon is a royal pain in the ass. Ask Chel Wolverton if you don’t believe me, she had to do the manual formatting for Marketing White Belt and was about ready to find whoever developed the .mobi spec and eviscerate them with a salt shaker. Scrivener supports these formats and will export to them very nicely, making it super easy to actually create an eBook for sale.
2. Outlines, notecards, and research modules. Each of these modules helps greatly for laying out the structure of a book. One of my less endearing traits is that I tend to jump around on various topics frequently, which can be really bad news for a book you’re trying to write if coherence is important. By having neatly organized “containers” for all the different parts of a book at my fingertips, I can jump around and write in different sections as I feel inspired.
3. Here’s the biggest deal closer for me: project targets. I absolutely love, adore, and worship this part of Scrivener because it keeps me on track. It’s quite simple: I dial up how many words I’m aiming to write for an eBook (I aim for about 10,000 words), dial in a due date as a goal to finish, and what days of the week I plan to write. For example, I aim to have Marketing Blue Belt written by the end of the year. I set the deadline as December 31, set 10,000 words as my target, and look what the program does:
That’s right: it gives me my overall target, progress towards that target, but most important: how much do I need to write today, in this session of writing, in order to make meaningful progress towards my goal and hit my deadline?
You can, of course, do the math yourself, but there’s something wonderfully inspiring and motivating about watching the little progress bar grow every time you tap out a word on your keyboard. I can push myself to write just a little bit more, just a few more sentences, just a few more thoughts and see my progress towards my goal.
Scrivener retails for $45. It’s not cheap by any means, though you can take a 21 day trial of it and see if it works for you. If you’ve ever thought, “I want to write a book/eBook/publication”, this might just be the tool that helps you towards that goal. Julien Smith says you’re bound to become a writer anyway, so if you plan to pursue it seriously, this might be a good piece of software for you to have.
I’ll issue the same caveat for Scrivener that I issue for all tools: the tool helps, but ultimately the hard work is up to you. Owning a nice DSLR won’t automatically make you a better photographer, and owning Scrivener won’t automatically make you a better writer.
If you’re interested, you can buy it here. (affiliate link) It’s available for Mac now in retail and in beta for Windows.
Full disclosure: this review was not prompted by anyone at Literature and Latte Software. I receive financial benefit via the affiliate links in the post.
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What to really worry about as a marketer
Sometimes you’ll do something that people will love, and life is wine and roses. People shower you with accolades, call you all sorts of very complimentary things, and business booms.
Sometimes you’ll do something that people will hate, and it seems like everything you own is on fire. People call you all sorts of very unflattering things, business might take a hit, and life feels like a very rocky road.
Both of these are okay. Both of these are good. Both of these show that people still feel something towards you, and it’s up to you to take that energy and direct it, shape it, focus it, and wield it to the best possible outcome.
In Buddhism, we use the symbol of the lotus flower for enlightenment not because it’s beautiful, but because it typically grows in piles of crap. From a very literal pile of crap, we can still get beauty. You can still take negative feedback and work to transform it into something positive for your marketing.
When you should worry is when no one cares. When you announce something and you don’t get fan mail or hate mail. When you send a newsletter and no one opens it. When your website hits a 100% bounce rate and no one’s sharing with their networks. The opposite of sweet or sour or bitter isn’t another flavor, it’s the absence of flavor entirely.
As long as your audience, your customers, your friends, your fans are giving you some kind of feedback, you’ve still got something to work with. When that’s gone, it’s time to throw in the towel and reboot. Don’t worry too much about sentiment being positive or negative.
Worry if anyone cares.
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