A valued network pointed me to Eben Moglen.  He scares a blogger with his concerns about Facebook, privacy, and databases.  If you read the post, the exchange is almost a Woody Allen piece with a young, confused, and earnest reporter interviewing a confident and crazed intellectual.  Moglen raises many of the same concerns I’ve noted about Facebook with its ability to capture, correlate, and classify everyone’s private information in real time, day after day after day.  Moglen imagines what I imagine: Hitler or Mao or Stalin bending Facebook to their purposes.  More prosaic, imagine Big Marketing bending Facebook to their purposes.  Shooting fish, political or profitable, in the digital barrel.

And yet . . . to misquote the immortal Clara Peller, Where’s the Domination?

Facebook is fully forth emerged and I can’t spot Orwell 2.0 or even Engulf and Devour 2.0.  Facebook is good for wasting time, PostMod musings, and angel investors, but the civic and commercial doomsday has yet to arise much less even rear its sleepy head.  On the few case studies I’ve done of Facebook Unleashed (like Al Gore and Climate Change or George W. Bush and book sales or Occupy Wall Street and whatever) show me that Facebook is selling sand to Sauds, but the rest of us are just lying on the beach working on our tans.

My concerns with Web 2.0 privacy remain:  It is a disaster waiting to happen.  Yet that disaster will say more about the Evil Maven who creates it rather than the technology He uses to perpetrate it.  Moglen and I misplay our worries when we shout about Facebook.  Hitler didn’t need no stinkin’ Web 2.0 to turn an enlightened, educated democracy into a totalitarian nightmare.  The Arab dictators had Web 2.0 and either they didn’t know how to use it or perhaps it really doesn’t matter that much after all.

Consider the Persuasion Rule:

Great Persuaders Don’t Need Rich Uncles, Kindness from Strangers, or Third Party Vote Splitters.

The power of persuasion is in the maven not in the magic.

You may already know about this and if you do, have you shared it with other people? Do so. Now.

The National Cancer Institute has an online tobacco cessation program for teens. It includes text to cell phone quit coaching and other helpful and private services.

These automatic communication programs have limited success rates whether using telephone, email, web, or now text and coming soon apps for smartphones. But, they do produce change in a few people and cost almost nothing to operate. Low effectiveness, sure, but incredible efficiency.

If you have a kid who smokes, point her to the website. If you know someone who knows a kid who smokes, point him to the website. WATtapping here can make a very small, but important change.

P.S. I found this at this JAMA article.

Bridget M. Kuehn. Texting Teens to Quit. JAMA. 2012;307(4):351.

doi: 10.1001/jama.2012.4

JAMA. 2012;307(4):351. doi: 10.1001/jama.2012.4

Facebook could file papers for the IPO as early as this coming Wednesday, but that timing is still being discussed, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is currently looking at a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion, this person said.

This from the Wall Street Journal. I will not be buying Facebook if only to maintain a foolish consistency between my public disdain for the company and my wallet. Please understand my concerns.

Facebook is a huge Reception/Exposure machine. Hundreds of millions of people look at Facebook everyday for several minutes. Anyone can place a message in that channel anytime with a high degree of targeting. Facebook delivers a lot of Exposure, but still not as much as the formerly great broadcast networks like CBS or even the great cable nets like ESPN.

People are still thinking that activities like Facebook are the new interpersonal, the new relational when it’s just another kind of technological device people use for communication. Sure, it can function as a relational or interpersonal tool and sure, some people might function relationally or interpersonally only through Facebook. But, the fundamental things like kisses and sighs will always apply: That’s why they are fundamental. Facebook is like phone sex and anyone who thinks that phone sex will triumph over the back seat of Your Father’s Oldsmobile understands neither technology nor human nature.

The persuasion problem with Facebook is that you get WATtapping, those tiny twitches of social meaning, mouse clicks. If you can tie your TACTs to WATtapping, Facebook makes sense. Music, ebooks, games. Sure. WATtapping TACTs.

However, if your TACTs require a larger behavior than “click,” Facebook is at best an adjunct to your main approach. I appreciate all the activist groups on Facebook and other social media, raising awareness for their cause and I’m sure they feel good about the experience. But, look at all the cases of failure. OWS. Al Gore’s Climate Day. George W. Bush selling his book.

If Facebook survives into the future it’s going to be more like the Dollar Store than Bloomingdale’s or even Walmart. Lots of penny transactions.

Facebook provides people with a sense of having a megaphone in a network, but look at the effects. Individuals and groups are not hitting large success with persuasive behavior change through Facebook. Any success is always confounded with many other huge factors. Take Arab Spring. Yeah. All those smartphones and twitter. The fact that the US Military has been on the ground since 2003 doesn’t make any difference at all. And, why no North Korean Spring? Cuban Spring? Why did Arab Spring take down the Pharoah and the Colonel, but still can’t remove the Dynastic Son in Syria?

Muggles love that Wisdom of the Crowd wisdom without thinking carefully about Crowds, Wisdom, and the actual outcomes. Add groovy new technology like an iGizmo in a cool social platform and the infatuation is complete.

I also observe the great live database of personal and social information that Facebook provides. Anyone who wants a snapshot or even a movie of people can acquire that from Facebook. It’s a fabulous surveillance and analysis tool. But realize that Facebook as marketing database is not Facebook as persuasion tool. Facebook is a research resource and not the actual persuasion play to achieve your TACT.

Finally, investors are sick of this slow market. S&P 500 is trading around 1300 which is 250 points under the 2008 high. Globalization is still popping along and while nearly 9 percent of Americans are unemployed, the 91% employed are working over time. We’re tired of fear and can’t wait for a greed market. If Facebook positions itself properly it could be not only the New New Thing, but also the start of the next great bull market. Wouldn’t you buy that IPO?

Thus, Facebook may well be worth $100 billion even if you can’t use it to persuade your spouse to give you a back rub. And that tells you something about the Moral Consequences of Peace and Prosperity, even in down times. When shared photo albums and back fence chatter is worth a hundred billion bucks, you know there’s a lot of fat out there.

A valued network pointed me to a study by Facebook engineers investigating the diffusion of information through the Facebook social network with an experimental design!  Yes.  Experimental.  The engineers randomly assigned nearly 250 million account holders (about half of the Facebook universe) to either receive a news story with a link from a friend or not.  They then tracked how that information diffused through the network.  Here’s a visual example of this t-test design.  Click to enlarge.

Over a two week period, Facebook engineers would assign a Feed story with link to one person while randomly assigning two other people as a no Feed control.  They did this repeatedly for two weeks over the 250 million selected accounts.  They then tracked how the link got diffused through the friend networks.

Talk about a big data set.  Huge, Jerry.  Huge!  Here’s the key finding.  Click to enlarge.

Look again at those underlined values.  Those randomly assigned to get a news story with URL in their feed showed a diffusion rate of 0.191% while those in control showed a rate of 0.025%.

Make sure you understand those little percentages.  About two tenths of one percent diffused the link in the treatment condition.  Thus, not even 1% of treatment people passed the link along.  Not even one half of 1%.  Barely 2/10 of 1 percent.

You can read the paper which I found at scribd.com.  Given all the kinds of variables you can generate from a database this large, there’s more to the paper with lots of graphs, but they depend upon relative ratios rather than absolute effects.  When you read that Outcome paragraph just above what probably struck you first was that huge relative risk ratio of 7.37.  A Large RR would be 4.50, so this is absolutely Stupendous.  The rest of the paper focuses upon those RRs while blithely skipping past the absolute diffusion rate.  I remind you:

0.191%.

Please think like a maven here and not a muggle looking to move your 401k into the Facebook IPO. What’s the TACT here?  What’s the Change you want from the Other Guy? Clicking on a link with a mouse and forwarding it to your Facebook network.

I’ve derided the social media TACTs before as the smallest units of communication you can create.  Realize that this huge database quivers with the digital signals of the twitch, the click, the WATtap.  That’s all they collected.  A click.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see if this clicking behavior drove other behaviors?  Like going outside of the Facebook network and using email, phone, or, gasp, face to face contact with other people about the information?  Like making a financial contribution?  Like volunteering.  Like calling law enforcement with a tip?  Like any real world, practical TACT?

And, shootfire, even fooling yourself briefly into thinking a click is as fundamental as kiss or a sigh as time goes by, what diffusion rate do you get?

0.191%.

Mavens, recall the fabulous Al Gore Facebook day.  He made a great scarcity play with a one day extravaganza on Climate Change through Facebook and inveigled everyone to donate their network to the cause.  How’d that go?

0.004%.

All folks had to do was click once and Gore’s machine would do the rest to then propagate the Gore message to your friends.  One little click.  And he got 0.004%.

Sure, we are mixing different variables in the comparison between Al Gore’s project and the one reported here.  The Facebook experiment created a forced exposure while you have to go find Mr. Gore on Facebook that day.  But we don’t have good research on social media, so we’re stuck doing these mental comparisons of apples and oranges, bytes and packets.

Social media has proven itself to be a toy, a pastime for killing time, phatic communication par excellence, a quick and easy way to be quick and easy, social without being sociable.  Sure, imagine a big event like the assassination of JFK or the Challenger explosion and doncha know that Facebook and twitter would light up.  But, so what?  Where’s the TACT?  What’s the Change in the Other Guy?

WATtapping clicks.

P.S. For what it’s worth, this paper apparently has not been published in a peer review source.  It’s been submitted to the Cornell University Library at arXiv.org.  I suspect it will get published in a good peer review outlet given the experimental design in a natural, if virtual, setting.  My practical persuasion concerns remain.  Facebook is a failure for Changing the Other Guys.  Focus on the kiss and the sigh, mavens.

I’ve got one of those beautiful and wildly complicated experimental psych studies that has the kind of control usually reserved for testing a new nuclear device and all to test how the brain processes sight and sound. Kim, Peters, and Sham demonstrate yet again why old fashioned psychology is a science with a series of small, simple, but smartly designed experiments.

Imagine you are looking at a computer screen with a bunch of dots each moving in a different direction up, left, down, diagonal. On either side of the screen rests a speaker with white noise coming out of each.

Each trial started with a fixation point, on which observers were instructed to fixate throughout the trial. Subjects performed a two-interval, forced-choice visual-coherent-motion-detection task, in which they were shown two displays in separate intervals: One interval (either the first or second) contained coherent visual motion, and the other contained only random motion (see Fig. 1). At the end of each trial, observers were prompted to press one of two keys to indicate in which interval they perceived coherent motion.

Stated another way, on each test, you’d see two screen with dots moving. On one screen the dots were moving randomly and on the other they were moving “coherently” (in roughly the same direction). You’d see one, then the other. Then you’d press a key to indicate which screen showed the coherent movement. During these trials that white noise could be playing from the speakers on either side of the screen.

The fun part arises with the white noise pattern. Sometimes the white noise “moved” with the dots. That is, sometimes the white noise would come predominantly out of the left speaker and at the same time, you’d see a screen where the dots move coherently to the left. Other times the white noise moved, but had no connection to the dots. Now, you are told to focus on the visual field and the movement of the dots and you must correctly identify the visual movement, not the movement of the white noise from speaker to speaker, but you are also told to attend to the white noise. Here’s a visual depiction of the experiments; it might be a bit confusing.

Kim et al. vary the relationship between sight and sound with the top sequence of this graphic showing the most interesting combination: When sight and sound show the same “coherence.” What happens to correct responding under the various conditions. Consider this graphic

Look at the upper left line chart. That 20% Correct difference at the Difficult level translates into a very Large Windowpane, nearly 10/90. When the movement of sight and sound are congruent, people are wildly better at picking up on it. As the authors put it:

In contrast, the results of the current study can most easily be explained by auditory-visual sensory interactions (Fig. 3b), and for the sake of parsimony, that is the explanation we favor. In such a model, the sensory representations are not conditionally independent of each other, and interaction between the two modalities occurs at both the perceptual and sensory levels of processing.

Now, finally, we can think about persuasion implications of this. When sight and sound move in the same way the Other Guys will generate greater and more accurate cognitive attention and processing. At the Reception and Processing stages in the Cascade, this is valuable.

The basic Box requires both sight and sound available to the Other Guy with a special emphasis upon the sound part where you have “speakers” around the “screen.” This experiment only tested stereo on two sides. Now imagine you’ve got surround sound. When you’ve got the Other Guy within the reach of your Coherent Sight and Sound Box, you fire off both an auditory and visual stimulus that moves in the same direction and makes the Other Guy see what you want. You can point them to . . .

A billboard, a cue, an argument, an image, a trademark or brand, a face, a claim, a quote, and on and on with the list of Plays that trigger persuasion. This coherence effect operates at a basic brain level, a hard wired human function. Employ the fundamental to shape the conditional. People do not have to receive, process, or respond to any persuasion play – it’s conditional. You use the Fundamental coherence function and connect it with your persuasion play.

Here’s a horribly effective possibility. Imagine a large billboard in a shopping area whether outdoors at Times Square or indoors at the Mall of America. Around the billboard are speakers. The screen goes blank then fills with blinking, jiggling dots and all the speakers strike the same musical chord. Then some of the dots move “coherently” in same direction as the sound of that musical chord also moves “coherently” in that same direction, say pointing to the bottom right corner of the billboard. Sight and sound arrives in that corner then up pops a pretty face with a bottle of Chanel no. 5 nearby. The screen goes blank, the speakers fall silence. Repeat.

Here’s a great large lecture teaching application. Got the same “billboard” set up with a big screen and speakers around it. Use the Coherence Play to notify important events. Run that visual and auditory razzle-dazzle I just described, but instead pop up, “Test Tuesday October 22!” Repeat.

Run this with training software. Use headphones. Anytime you want to make a Big Point, play the Coherence Razzle-Dazzle. Repeat.

Hey, fighter pilots. Could you designate targets with both a visual and auditory cue? Thus, as you maneuver in space, you receive a moving auditory cue for the physical location of the target even as you reverse direction and roll upside down? Why not with ground gun commanders as in tanks?

Let’s get out of here . . . this Coherence Play operates at a fundamental level of human information processing. All faces, places, times, and rhymes. Combine it with the conditional information processing you want with persuasion. Let coherence drag the Other Guy’s cognitive resources where you want it.

Kim R, Peters MA, Shams L. 0 + 1 > 1: How Adding Noninformative Sound Improves Performance on a Visual Task. Psychol Sci. 2011 Nov 29. [Epub ahead of print]

doi: 10.1177/0956797611420662