America Needs A “Third Place”

A “third place” is a social space that is distinct from the two “usual” environments of home (i.e. “first place”) and work (i.e. “second place”). In both popular press accounts
and marketing/consumer research, third places are often characterized as readily accessible social venues frequented by regulars but open to all comers. Something like a community center, coffee house, cafe or “mom and pop” restaurant. Third places become community congregation points and, importantly, provide a centralized “sense of place” that facilitates creative interaction among people. This interaction can amount to “everyday” social engagement (i.e. water cooler chat, gossip, laughing with friends), but hopefully also includes civic discourse. The idea is to give folks an outlet to talk to one another, and address issues that are important to them as a community.

Compared to what I have experienced abroad in the tea shops and espresso houses of Asia and Europe, the United States has a relatively underdeveloped “third place infrastructure.” I have not examined the historical evidence, but I believe during the early development of the nation, citizens participated more in third place interaction.

Chalk it up to modernization and the rise of digital interaction, but the third place seems to have diminished in importance in American society. While I still see vestiges of third place interaction at Starbucks or even discussions among neighbors in the parking lot at Wal-Mart, these outlets are “impromptu” third places and do not constitute a consistent, welcoming space for regular engagement, which is an important criterion for being a third place. In the case of Starbucks, despite presenting a seemingly inviting space with soft couches and hip jazz music, their coffee shops are largely designed to maintain customer throughput, not congregation.

Perhaps the loss of the third place banter has something to do with the ongoing outbursts and general lack of civility during town hall meetings across America (which seems to have spilled over into congressional engagements). Dramatic changes (perceived or otherwise) in the way the nation is being governed is certainly an impetus for the passionate exchanges during these meetings. But could it be that the prior lack of ongoing face-to-face discourse and dialogue — impromptu town hall meetings on a small scale via third places — has contributed to the current powder keg?

Talk to my customers? Are you kidding?

Strangely, many marketers scoff at the prospect of actually rolling up their sleeves and talking to end consumers of their products or services. Marketing research seems to be synonymous with throwing together a survey or questionnaire and blasting it out to a selected sample of people. While this allows for convenience and breadth of coverage, it does not dig deep into what really makes consumers tick — and how products fit into their everyday lives.

Consumers are people first, and consumers second. Tapping into what makes them people provides valuable insight into not only current “usage scenarios” with your products and services, but potential situations for use, and thus opportunities. The argument for this deeper, richer level of research, often posited under the guise of ethnography, has been well documented elsewhere in books like Hidden in Plain Sight by Erich Joachimsthaler or How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman.

But the fact that marketers often avoid doing this nitty gritty heavy lifting is disturbing. Even worse, I’ve found that engineering and R&D types can be even more averse to the proposition of listening to the “voice(s) of the customer.” The (Veblenian) attitude seems to be that if customers raise concerns over the designers’ creations, the problem lies with the customer and not the design of the product. In the world of help desk support, this attitude can be heard in the saying “the problem lies between the seat and the keyboard.”

The paranoia surrounding relinquishment of brand ownership and product design to the “sweaty masses” or “hoi polloi” via social media is an extension of this aversion to actually listening to what customers have to say, warts and all, and embracing (as opposed to criticizing) their natural imperfections as part of usability design. New product development professionals and marketers can either run from or attempt to exert control over the conversations going on in social media about their products, or they can listen and probe and better understand the lives of their customers — and how their products fit in.

Social Media is About Connecting, Not “Marketing”

By connecting I mean engaging in conversation. That might lead to the marketer/PR rep’s holy grail of varying degrees of a “relationship” or it might simply remain conversational and relatively superficial. But the key is to approach social media as a tool for engagement, not an outlet for marketing.

The “traditional” media used for marketing (e.g. television, radio, newspaper, outdoor) are largely one-way venues of communication. The internet, web and “Web 2.0” are interactive media, thus two-way venues of communication. Marketing is all too often associated with one-way communication (note that “one-way communication” is a bit of an oxymoron since the root word of communication is communicatis, or an act of sharing — think “commune”). But anyone involved in the discipline of marketing knows that it is just as much about listening as it is broadcasting. The diagram below is my attempt to present the two-way function(s).

In the center of the diagram, marketers act as “boundary spanners” and engage with consumers. The “market” is represented by consumers on the left and the “company/organization” is represented by the building on the right. Marketing actually involves three levels of interaction:

1. The blue arrows represent research-oriented interaction between marketers and consumers. Inquiring and listening to what consumers do, what they want, what they don’t want, what they like and what they don’t like.
2. The yellow arrows represent the new product development (NPD) interaction with the organization/company that marketers work for. Marketers should be advocates for the consumers that they engaged with during the research interaction.
3. The red arrows represent a return to consumers to “communicate value” through marketing communications such as sales and advertising. This what most people think marketers do all day. But importantly, the red arrows “close” by coming back to marketers with responses from consumers — and this is the important part. The first leg of the loop is about broadcasting. The closure of the loop is about listening and conversation. It really represents a continuation of the first “blue” cycle of research-oriented interaction.

All of these activities can be greatly facilitated by social media. Social media creates “touch points” with consumers that generate many opportunities for the three levels of interaction represented in the diagram:

• research by engaging with and understanding consumers
• customer “advocacy” through support/problem resolution
• new product introduction and education
• co-creation/co-production with consumers
• and last (and probably least), a potential channel for “pure-play” traditional marketing communications

One could argue that in the “yellow interaction” of new product development, social media can be leveraged to put consumers directly in touch with new product developers, alleviating marketers as intermediaries. I think this is useful if new product developers (e.g. engineers, designers) are willing to listen. But I still think marketers play a role in guiding and aggregating the conversations with consumers.

The key for all of these opportunities is addressing the new shift in balance of power. Consumers are no longer passive recipients of information. They engage in it, they are savvy about and even averse to pure-play marketing, and they will become engaged with your product/company/brand if you display sincerity in listening, not just broadcasting.

RE: The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)

The Wall Street Journal‘s Jeffrey Zaslow posted an interesting article entitled “The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)” wherein he talks about the Millennial Generation and their seemingly “subconsious” propensity for using communication technologies such as cell phone texting, instant messaging and social-networking applications (e.g. Facebook, MySpace).

The key concern: How can young people get any work done if they are “hyper-socializing” and holding multiple conversations with others through these technologies?

The experts weigh in.

In one corner: They can’t. The communication that is going on is “futile and trivial” (according to one expert cited in the article). What’s more, the interactions with devices and online networks while in the workplace are a drain on productivity. People are goofing off and employers are paying for it.

In the other corner: They can, and because they are multi-tasking socializers, it actually helps their social skills. They’re able to prioritize, optimize, and nimbly handle multiple streams of interaction while quickly boiling issues down to their essence. This, says another expert, is an important skill in today’s work world.

My take is this:

1. The onslaught of hyper-connectedness is here to stay — in the home, at the workplace, in school, and in society. So, we can complain all we want, but the horse is out of the barn. People will have to adjust to the new ways of always-on, always present interactive communications.
2. People have been goofing off at work since time immemorial. Before the internet it was private phone calls. Before phone calls, it was water cooler chat, three martini lunches, and golf. Then (and now) it has been reading the newspaper or daydreaming. Productivity will always be affected by people goofing off. The prohibition of social networking sites in an effort “thwart” drains on productivity is akin to turning off email or preventing phone calls and can actually send signals to employees that you don’t trust them, as Shel Holtz has been arguing on his blog.
3. “Futile and trivial” conversations have also been going on since time immemorial, and even though folks might not be using social media and other networking technologies to wax philosophic about “important” issues such as the meaning of life or how to end world hunger, the “superficial” conversations occurring through social media can actually lend themselves to building and maintaining relationships — something few would argue is not important in today’s business climate. Not all relationships developed through social media run deep. But what applies to interaction in non-work scenarios also lends itself to interactions in the workplace. For example, I communicate with many friends and family members in short bursts and in ways that might seem “futile and trivial,” but nonetheless important. My friend Brian van Huss put it well: If Nietzsche were alive today, even he wouldn’t be talking/writing/publishing “important” content all the time. But he probably would find time to think about such things. And this leads to my final point …
4. What I’m more critical of is the loss of contiguous, uninterrupted blocks of time to concentrate on whatever endeavors one needs to get done … so, can this generation disconnect from these tools when necessary, disengaging the “surface,” and focusing in-depth on issues that need such attention?
   

Microsoft Stores = Tech Support Nightmare (?)

So, Microsoft has decided to go “head to head” with Apple on the retail front. This made for interesting conversation in my marketing class yesterday, where the day’s topic happened to be retailing. For the most part, my students thought the idea was a bad one, primarily because Microsoft is not “cool.” But apparently so do a lot of others in the industry, despite words of caution on nay-saying. (Note: This latter link alone is worth following just to see Steve Jobs’ “pitch” for Apple stores, circa 2001.)

But my take is this: Microsoft primarily sells software (Zune and XBox as the exceptions). Their software is distributed across many platforms and is largely independent of hardware. Apple sells an experience. It is self-contained and thus easily controlled. Microsoft plans to have something similar to the “Genius Bar.” So if I buy my version of Windows from the Microsoft store, do I have access to the (Microsoft) Genius Bar? If so, I can see a tech support nightmare in the making. I mean, what are they actually supporting? Do they turn people away with hardware issues? With so many possible hardware-software configurations … Yikes.

Outlook is Losing, “Lifestreaming” is Winning, But We Still Need Organization

As I’ve become more involved in researching and participating in social media, it has become apparent that nobody has “cracked the code” on a productivity tool that would manage all of the different social media outlets (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs). In other words, I want one place to go so I can connect to all of these outlets at once, without having to log into each separately. I’m test-driving Seesmic desktop right now. It’s got a pretty decent interface, but seems prejudiced to only Facebook and Twitter (two SM biggies, I admit). Also, it doesn’t allow me to see private replies on Facebook, nor manage who I’m following on Twitter. I like that it runs on Adobe’s AIR platform and is therefore not web-based, but it still offers a limited menu in terms of which sites I can manage.

As to “social web browsers,” there’s FriendFeed, Flock and Streamy. I’m going to give them a whirl.

What’s interesting though is that despite my downloading a 85 megabyte update to Microsoft Outlook this past weekend (rendering no apparent change in the UI), there’s still not a peep from the king of “productivity software.” I did find TwInbox add-in for managing Twitter as an Outlook folder, but it has some quirks with the toolbar placement in Outlook.

The old paradigm of private communication through email, while not going away, is being augmented (and for some supplanted) by “lifestreaming” … an ongoing feed of communications through various networks that allows publication of “what’s going on” to the world, not just a single person on the other end of an email address. The good thing about email is there’s one point of contact, my email address, versus the many that have emerged with social media.

Whoever can get their hands around managing multiple social media outlets is going to be the winner.

People Under 25 Don’t Care About Privacy?

During a Web 2.0 discussion at the recent Association for Consumer Research conference, scholar Rob Kozinets posed the question: Do people under the age of 25 care about their privacy? The context of the discussion dealt with social media and the “trade-off” between being networked with friends (and strangers) and divulging private information. Young people seem more willing to provide information about themselves, in the form of social media site profiles and status updates, for example. So is there a shift in attitudes toward privacy? Are “under 25ers” simply naive about the information that they divulge? Is there a notion of “apparent” privacy (i.e. nicknames and personas that mask real personal data) and “actual” privacy (i.e. real anonymity). Is “actual” privacy really possible these days?