Monthly Archives: June 2012

What Is Your Narrative

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I’ve long held a set of narratives, stories that I tell. I sometimes feel bad about using specific ones, and have admitted previously to the fraud that I am. It’s by lies of omission or using a selective narrative, always honest. Here are all the major narratives that I tell regarding college.

I’ve been out of school for 4 years now, and the question that often comes up is what happened. This here is where the story starts. Depending on who it is that I am speaking, and other context. There are several reasons, each with their own story to detail. I could discuss all of them, but it’s often in idle banter, so it would be overkill. In the end, I normally resort to only one or two.

The most common story is that my back went out the night before finals. While it’s the truth, and it’s the simplest to discuss, I don’t prefer it. I don’t like it because it generates sympathy, which is nice, but it always makes me feel like I’m lying.

Another story, that is common is that I decided the system is broken. This one obviously isn’t simple to explain, but I can just spit out a line or two about the system, as almost everyone agrees it’s broken. This is also the honest truth, I had saw the precursors of the 2008 financial collapse and wanted to get a job as soon as possible to shelter myself and family.

The reason I wanted to help my family is the 3rd story, that I rarely discuss. I’ve mentioned it only once or twice. My mom had quit her job so that she could help in taking care of my great-grandparents, and after their passing at the beginning of 2006, had struggled to find another position for 2 years. This weighed on my mind heavily, and is partially the reason I had such a negative reaction to the ridiculousness of the academic system.

Another story is that I had a hard time adapting, because I was tossed into the deep end, even after trying to explain this would be negative. During course registration, they placed me in Calculus, and I had asked for remediation in Trig, as I had 0 experience with Trigonometric identities after being fucked around with in high school. Upon my asking, I was told that my standardized test scores in mathematics were too high for me to be placed in remediation. Of course, that wasn’t their last blunder, they stuck me in a general Calculus program, that moved more slowly than that of my college and with a professor outside of my college. So any discussions I had with my academic adviser resulted in confusion.

All the while I was dealing with a rather inept teacher, in a course without recitation and lacking the same pace as the engineering program. My first 4 weeks I spent 60+ hours a week trying to brute force my way through that one course. The last time I went to a scheduled course, was during the second semester, when I asked a Trig question to the professor of the remedial Calculus teacher and he responded, “You don’t know Trig, then why are you here?” I don’t blame him, and explained the registration situation, but didn’t like being attacked for something I knew was wrong but couldn’t get changed. I still respect him, and he was one of the best professors I had while in school. After that interaction I stopped attending my courses. I started dropping in freely to other courses that seemed more interesting or that my friends were attending so that we had something else to discuss outside our general topics.

Lastly, and another one that I rarely mention, definitely not outside of family and friends. I partied a bit too much to try and help cope with all the other stress I was dealing with. It helped me feel better, but it didn’t help in the long run, there was at least a few times where I was too hungover at exams in the middle of the week. There are plenty of individual stories I have that I could share, but in general this is it.

While each story is true, they also each evoke different responses. Some result in sympathy, others questions, and some with just a shrug and now you know better. It’s up to you to choose. Ultimately, I’m responsible for every choice I made, but not all of them were by choice or even mine.

Every event has more than one perspective, and sometimes an individual has more than one thread that they can weave their cloth. The narrative of our fate is presented in whatever way that we choose to narrate it. Stories abound, but it’s up to you to choose which you want to tell.

Solving the Social Intent Problem, or Why Facebook Will Succeed

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This is one of the biggest issue needing to be solved for the current and future crop of social media companies. As I had ran down in the previous post on user intent, Social Intent is lacking a direct monetization system. I believe that it can be solved and will be; this is my run-down of the issues and a few points of focus that maximize potential. Throughout the post, I’ll try to keep the points mostly agnostic, but still make specific points in the case of Facebook.

As is well known by now, Facebook recently had it’s financial potential put into question. The question came in two rather bold points, the faltering of the IPO and GM’s decision to pull it’s ads from Facebook. In my mind, both are wrong-headed if you look at it from a long-term perspective, believing Facebook can solve the Social Intent problem.

The first step in fixing the model is understanding what type of associations and products lend themselves to socializing in the real world where the money is. One area sticks out instantly here, communications and mobile, which I’ll come back to momentarily. The other areas to focus on are where we’re already doing in-person socialization and real sharing: sharing food(at restaurants), sharing music(albums and concerts), watching movies(at home or in the theater), other forms of in-person entertainment, and even things like sharing tools at work.

I have just listed a few different areas where advertising still makes sense on the platform, and enhances it. The next step is figuring out where and how to do the advertising. A few things that I think will work in the environment is promoting deals to groups of friends, using a focused approach to kick-off a word of mouth campaign, or promoting tools that extend or even compete with the platform.

Promoting deals to groups of friends is focused on experiences, and sharing them. Offering small group-buy discounts on services that bring people together would be a good sell. Also things that people would want to share with their friends after buying. The biggest thing though is where this should be, it needs to be mobile. Mobile means you can promote live deals on location data, this will be key for Facebook.

Facebook provides one of the most detailed systems for focusing on specific user for promotion. Using this to promote to a specific market that will love and share it with others will be gold. If you can find a product that is shareable enough, and can get some enthusiasts hyped about it, it makes sense to try this approach to reach a broad base cheaply. Not all products have a broad capacity though. Take GM for instance, vehicles aren’t one of the products that individually have broad capacity. GM’s ads weren’t fit for the market and eyeballs still don’t mean much ever after a decade.

This one is a bit questionable, considering I mention helping to promote competition. Of course, if they’re paying you, you get to see some metrics on how they’re doing, and you the sub-graphs may still be maintained or tightened by them. Promoting extension and competition make sense for a platform as it keeps the network tight, while allowing a form of escapism. In many ways, Facebook has huge advantages over most other companies in that they have both a large network that has hit critical mass and have a successful platform for extension.

This is a market or two and it’s currently anyone’s game to solve. I don’t know who’s going to get to the fruit first, but it’s there and I see it. Time to figure out if and how to sneak past the giant and grab it.

Ok, now mostly FB. There have been rumors and talk about Facebook phones or advanced cameras to compliment their service and photo-based extension of that service. I think, as I pointed out reason above, this is a no-brainer. You want to maximize the sharing on the site, but also promote real world interaction for the substance to share. If you can provide the tools to make this seamless in setting up and sharing experiences, from beginning to end, you’re in control. I’m not saying they need their own device, but it would make it more simple to do.

Facebook as it stands is profitable. They have the time and resources to solve this problem, and most of the secondary and sub-problems that I have missed and would surely arise during the process. If they figure this out they won’t have to worry about the doubt. It’s also why I feel long on Facebook, though I still believe it will come down further.