True Digital Detective
4 Reasons Why We’re All Converging at the Digital Water Cooler
Two weeks ago, Facebook announced that it was adding Shazam-Style Auto Content Recognition to help you automatically tag posts with TV shows and songs. Firing a shot across the bow of incumbents in this space, Josh Constine, who authored the announcement on TechCrunch wrote:
“The launch could spell trouble for audio ID heavyweights SoundHound and industry leader Shazam…Facebook is cutting out the middleman, and putting the feature in one of the most ubiquitous apps in the world”
This is a clear evolution from Facebook’s move last year, when it introduced features to try and capture the expressive world of how you are feeling or what you are doing at any point in time. Whether you’re ‘excited on a Friday night’, ‘travelling to San Fran on Saturday’ or ‘feeling tired on a Sunday’, there’s an emoticon for all of the above.
By adding audio recognition to these expressions and removing the friction in sharing digital consumption habits, Facebook is making a play to solidify their position as the go-to destination to find out what digital content your friends and family are consuming in real-time. At the time of writing, rumours of an online petition against this new feature have emerged. Traditionally though, Facebook don’t waver from their product roadmap (remember all the controversy over Facebook’s facial recognition software labelled DeepFace?). I don’t see this trend changing in this instance either.
As suggested, perhaps Twitter should have built this feature — after all, wasn’t that what the now defunct Twitter Music was all about? More specifically, it could have unlocked listening habits on their platform and promoted the most followed Twitter users (mainly recording artists) in the process. If recent reports are to believed, Twitter may be willing to buy their way out of trouble with acquisition rumours rife with mention of potentials deals for Soundcloud and Spotify in the past few months. In fact, the entire digital music ecosystem is moving (and moving quickly) as the major players are all trying to build up their arsenals of digital content. Apple buying Beats for $3B is the current high-water mark and seems pricey but who knows how long that will remain as the biggest acquisition in the current market? As Benedict Evans pointed out in a recent blog post about the Beats acquisition “media has gone from being a choke-point to a check-box, commodity feature than every platform has to offer but where none has any particular advantage”.
These feints, attacks and countermoves remind me of how the main protagonists in the hit series True Detective, Rust Cohle and Marty Hart end up catching the bad guy (it’s a show about detectives so hopefully that won’t qualify as a spoiler!). Information is power and the players that know the most and who stay the course the longest stand to break the case.
As Constine notes “This fight is partly about helping users connect around media, which can inspire passionate debate and engagement. But there’s also a lot of money to be made by being the digital watercooler”. Let’s look at why we’re converging there.
“Everybody judges, all the time. Now, you got a problem with that, you’re living wrong.”
1. Social Validation
Rust Cohle is possibly my favourite TV philosopher — every episode is another opportunity to glean some pearls of wisdom from the modern day Aristotle with a gun and a badge. On this point, Rust Cohle is on the money as usual — we are social beasts and still judge one another on a daily basis. The corollary of this is of course is that we all still seek approval and acceptance from the tribe that judges us in one form or another. Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover, authors of the excellent book ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ have the following to say on this point:
Rewards of the tribe, or social rewards, are driven by our connectedness with other people. Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included. Many of our institutions and industries are built around this need for social reinforcement…It is no surprise that social media has exploded in popularity. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and several other sites collectively provide over a billion people with powerful social rewards on a variable schedule. With every post, tweet, or pin, users anticipate social validation. Rewards of the tribe keep users coming back, wanting more.
Just look at the number of social rewards on offer for any particular status update on Facebook. We’re hardwired into communicating our status quo. It’s no wonder that Rust and Marty are able to uncover a trail of clues left by sociopathic criminals who are just as keen to leave their mark on the world. Equally, our digital fingerprints are everywhere and this primeval need doesn’t look like it’s going to be satisfied anytime soon.
“Well, once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”
2. Ease and Ubiquity of Sharing
The final quote from Rust Cohle in the season finale sums up how the internet has allowed us to reveal more about ourselves than any other time in history. Where immortality used to be limited to those select few who were recorded in print, each and every one us now can (if we so choose to) have a digital legacy that will last the eons (some would argue that we don’t have a choice!).
Just as our social profiles tell others about who we are, our digital consumption patterns tell them the world what we’re listening to/watching/reading. Previously we would have to manually tag these data points (eg Shazam a song that we’re listening to on the radio). Now this information can be shared automatically (using Shazam’s auto feature for ambient plays or Soundwave’s mobile scrobbling service for native mobile plays). Our consumption patterns don’t have to be interrupted and we can go about our daily lives sharing as much or as little as we like in the click of a button.
The biggest contributor to this has probably been Facebook’s OpenGraph where any of your online ‘activity’ (eg using any application or website where you sign-in using FB’s sign-in process) can be catalogued and displayed in one place on your activity feed. The reality is that for most people, the ease of FB log-in and automatic sharing outweighs the friction associated with signing up to a site and submitting email details, age, sex etc. We know we can change our privacy setting later if needed. We may never get those five minutes spent onboarding back ever again ;)
I’d argue that when it comes to the ease and ubiquity of sharing, we’re at an inflection point — it has become so common a use case that the light has permanently taken over from the dark. Interestingly, Facebook recently announced that they would be favouring ‘Explicit’ sharing over ‘Implicit’ sharing on a User’s News Feed. It’s important to note that they have no plans to scrap implicit sharing though and I’d label this as just a different measurement of light — call it Lumens over Watts.
“You know Marty, without me — there is no you”
3. Interdependent Platforms
Now this an overly harsh comment from Rust but it helps illustrate how two interdependent platforms mutually rely on each other to exist. The current online state is evolving in a different form to Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. If version 1.0 was about static web pages and the passive viewing of content, version 2.0 allowed users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. The content that developed on both versions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 was mostly findable and publicly viewable (let’s not get into a discussion about the Deep Web just yet). It looks like one major iteration of Web 3.0 is the creation and sharing of non-public and unfindable content.
Mary Meeker’s widely acclaimed and prescient presentation on Internet Trends in 2014 at CodeConference best describes this state of symbiosis (this is worth a read in full if you haven’t yet). She demonstrates that the current online ecosystem is reliant on two separate kinds of content hosting platforms — some of which focus on findable public information and others which focus on hidden or transient information. It’s clear from the success of both camps that there is a need to facilitate the two of them together.
The above are markedly different to other platforms such as Whatsapp and Mark Cuban’s CyberDust messaging apps that allow for quick and private forms of communication.
There is no right or wrong way to communicate digitally. The Digital Water Cooler facilitates small talk. Period. For some it may be a place to gossip privately about their co-workers after the Christmas party (you’ve done it too!). For others it can be used as a way to publicly boast about the latest concert in town that they attended (you had to be there!). These are two very separate landscapes but each play an equally important role in facilitating our need open up and share with one another.
“A man’s game charges a man’s price.”
4. The ‘Cost’ of Doing Business
What Marty means here is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. As the public internet nears 23 years of age, I think it’s fair to say that the majority of people online are experienced enough to know that in a value exchange, where they get to use a really handy product for free (eg Instagram), there will be an associated costs of using it (in-app advertising). Without this system, many of the worlds most popular platforms could never have grown into the behemoths that they are now: just Google it!
But here’s an interesting question — when is the last time you looked at a real water cooler (as in the one you get your water from everyday in the office)? Chances are they have a big branding sticker right at the point where you get your daily dosage of H2O. Watercooler suppliers know one thing about their product — that where there’s convergence, there’s an opportunity to advertise.
Herd mentality is a great opportunity for advertisers to get their message in front of a lot of people at one time. When it comes to the digital water cooler, this advertising is split into two separate models:-
- Indirect— working out what people are watching, reading, listening to in order to co-ordinate their offline advertising campaigns. Nielsen sell this data of ‘What People Watch, What People Buy’ to such clients and do fairly well in the process (their ‘Watch’ segment accounted for 35% of their annual turnover in 2011 which equates to approx. $1.8B in revenue). It pays to be in the know.
- Direct— putting ads in front of people at the point of convergence. Twitter’s promoted tweets and twitter cards, together with MoPub (who they acquired) do a great job of this reaching more than 1 billion unique devices in one of the largest mobile ad exchanges in the world. If Twitter sees that you’re tweeting about the upcoming episode of True Detective, it can target it’s mobile app promotion suite to get the right message to you at the right time.
Brands will continue to target the busiest digital watercoolers and it seems that mobile is the most fertile ground at present. Returning to the excellent Internet Trends of 2014 presentation, % time spent in digital media vs % of advertising spend exposes this $30B mobile opportunity best. It turns out a man’s game can charge a very high price.
The race to become the True Digital Detective is on. It’s just a shame that Rust and Marty aren’t in the running.
It would be great to hear from you. If you’re into music, feel free to check out @Soundwave. If it’s the chats you’re after, Tweet at me. If you liked this post, please recommend it.
