J's Journey

[itsjasonwan21]

Gamification, which means “using game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts”, has been hot over the years. Love for games is part of human nature, so it sounds plausible that turning a boring daily stuff into a game is effective to change people’s behaviors. I personally like the idea “making a boring thing fun to do”, but I’m still not that convinced that gamification is a life saver for all industries. 

In most cases as I know, gamification is implemented through incorporating all the game components like tasks, levels, earned points, badges, and virtual products. Sometimes, it could be a good thing since it’s motivating your behavior in a playful way. Here’s one of my personal examples: I attempted to learn French, at least 4 times in the past, but every time I gave up after 1 month. And now with the help of Duolinguo, a language learning app embracing the gamification philosophy, I just stick to it for 6 months practicing French 15 mins literally everyday, and made much bigger progress than ever before. To be honest, sometimes the real reason for me to get to the app and practice is no more than, to keep my 59-day streak going, or to catch up with my friend on the leaderboard. It’s simple but sometimes effective. Another example is Code School, which rewards me badges during my R coding learning journey. Anyway it gives you a sense of achievement and self-expression, it satisfies your desire to compete, it enables you to show off among your friend circle, it simply makes you feel good, just like you play Fruit Ninja on your smartphone.

Other than educational application, gamification still works in many fields such as environment and marketing. Here’re two great examples of how gamification could be applied to converse people into a more environmental-friendly lifestyle. The two videos linked below are both short and interesting.

The world’s deepest bin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw

Bottle Bank Arcade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSiHjMU-MUo

So far it seems like gamification is such a powerful tool to solve almost every problem right? But as I saw on Quora, tons of game developers are strongly opposing this idea, raising many good points through out the argument. “Gaming is all about fun, but gamification is about incentives and rewards, it’s only borrowing game elements”, “You can’t just improve users engagement only with gaming techniques”, a lot of people think games and gamified activities are inherently different. Also some people point out that “achievement can suck the fun out of activity”, which make great sense psychologically. Even some people who are very pessimistic about gamification’s future predict it will “slowly die”.

Gamification is great, but never the leading role on the stage, it helps people to do things they want to do, but it can’t encourage them to do things they don’t want to do. Let’s go back to the Duolingo case, if language is not what I’m interested in, no matter how many points or badges it offer to me, I won’t spend any time on that. If you have a visceral desire to do something, but sometime lack perseverance to follow your plan everyday, gamification can help you to carry on by providing incentives in a fun way. That’s the only way gamification can help.

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How to think like Jeremy Goldman?

Jeremy Goldman(https://twitter.com/jeremarketer), the so-called “Renaissance Man”, is a guy who can “talk forever” about digital marketing and social media. Basically he’s one of the most interesting guest speaker I’ve ever met. A great story teller with a funny phone case.

Here comes the take-aways I got from Jeremy’s lecture. Probably I’ll write a book named How To Think Like Jeremy Goldman, just for fun but not for making money. Frankly speaking, as a marketer I really wish I could somewhat think like Jeremy. He got magic with him.

No lectures, but stories      Jeremy’s interesting because he’s always telling stories. He really understands what the students are asking for from a guest speaker, no lectures, but stories. Remember how Steve Jobs started when he was giving a speech at Stanford commencement? “No big deal. Just three stories” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHWUCX6osgM

Stand out.      Stand out, or die. That’s the rule today. I know it’s not something new but Jeremy made a good point about that. He shared an example of a bad hashtag—A Sephora stuff made a hashtag #new. It would stand out by no means and it ended up going nowhere.

Stay Relevant.      Relevance is the key in terms of any content marketing. My favorite story from Jeremy’s talk is the case #lovedrop campaign. I think the reason why it achieves such a great success is because the campaign idea is super relevant and it does embrace the company vision and philosophy of the client, that’s about connecting people through real-life interactions. And then a cross-channel social campaign on the Valentine’s day did hit the sweet spot.

Keep an eye on the changes.      By answering my question, Jeremy points out that a marketer should be extremely receptive and keep an eye on the fast-changing market place. A good marketer incorporates all relevant information and try to find out the rules and mechanisms, and then predicting the future as well as making move ahead.

Your phone case tells people something      I think everybody there was impressed by the big Rilakkuma phone case. That’s lovely. Accessories, like your phone case, are parts of your self branding. We can know something about this guy like he’s funny and relaxed and he might be a nice father.

Hats off to the Renaissance Man, and to the phone case as well.

[itsjasonwan21]

Address criticism is risky, but it’s riskier not to do that

I went to the Disneyland in Orlando, Florida with my girl-friend during the spring break last month. Generally it’s a field-trip of great fun, but something unpleasant still happened when we take the Caribbean Pirates ride. While exploring the adventurous world of captain Jack Sparrow, our boat just stopped suddenly. “Is it part of the ride?” I just wondered at that moment. But after 5 minutes, nothing happened. A staff then made an announcement through the speaker, “Ladies and Gentleman, your voyage is temporally stuck. Please stay seated for your own safety.” 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, the “voyage” was still “temporarily stuck”. And the staff told us, “Please don’t take any photos and don’t post anything about it online.”

I do appreciate the efforts the staffs made to get us out of there, and I do appreciate what Disneyland do to compensate us. They gave us an express pass, which helped a lot by reducing the amount of time we standing in line. But the fact that they don’t want anything like this to go online fails to satisfy me. I just googled something like “Disneyland stuck on ride” and I saw quite a lot things. Even someone famous, the MLB player Jamie Moyer, was inevitably “temporarily stuck” on ride while enjoying Disneyland. http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/jamie-moyer-got-stuck-on-california-screamin--ride-at-disneyland-000305294.html  It’s really impossible to block something like this to go online.

It’s not about making no mistakes but the way you deal with mistakes, especially for a strong brand like Disney. Just address the fault and stay open to the criticism, and react quickly, say sorry, even talk a little bit about the compensation effort. I think that’ll display a sense of transparency and responsibility, which is crucial for a brand.

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Is human decision-making dead in the era of Big Data?

I was impressed by a baseball movie staring Brad Pitt named Money Ball, which talks about statistical analysis in Baseball. With the data oriented philosophy, Billy Bean, the general manger of Oakland A’s achieves great success. A good question has been brought out in the film: which is more reliable? Computer algorithms or scouts’ eyes.

In the past, baseball players can only be judged by experienced scouts, who always make vague and unfalsifiable comment like “He’s a real player”. But now, with the great impact of data crunching, baseball managers are able to make more rational and unbiased decisions. For example, a player gets on base well but looks fat might be ignored by scouts, but data never tells a lie. Generally speaking, numbers rule out all factors might lead to biases, like personal preferences and emotions.

However, does it really mean human decision-making is dead? I don’t think so.

Some people predict that scout is a job which will be phased out in the future. It might be. But I still think there’s something cannot totally be interpreted by data analysis. The mental, psychological things can only be detected through personal observations and interactions. George Steinbrenner, the former president of New York Yankees, once told people that he’s been around for years and seen so many players, and he could really tell the difference by first sight. When he saw in to Derek Jeter’s eyes, he really saw a champion player who’s determined and confident. Mental things are always too intangible to put in a regression model.

Even though data crunching is the new smart today, I still insist that there’s room for human decision-making. Super Crunchers, the book I recently read, makes a good point about this. Even experts fail to outperform computers in terms of predictions and estimations in most cases, we still need them to determine what factors should be taken into account, what variables should be put into the equations. Data itself will never be able to do this.

[itsjasonwan21]

Good listening works for cocktail party and social media marketing

Social media is a giant cocktail party. Actually I found it a great metaphor.

I just ended my spring-break Miami trip yesterday, during which I took a lot of cocktail, Miami Sunset, Sangres Mojito, Gulp of Mexico, you name it. It was great fun of it. But I’ve never really gone to a real cocktail PARTY, which I’ve seen so many times in movie scenes. Grand hall, so many people striking up initial conversation, talking about their new Lamborghini or the yacht trip to Bahamas, showing off their wealth and refined taste in a casual way. Everybody is trying to be impressive within 5 mins, with all kinds of purposes from forging business partnership to picking up a hot, sexy girl. Everybody tries to dominate the conversations, everybody talks about ME, or something I FOUND INTERESTING. Suddenly I realize social media works in the same way, a lot of conversations going on at the same time, with everyone struggling to build up favored image, in a short period if possible. It’s all about self-image management.

Gradually, marketers found out that social media is a powerful tool in terms of branding. I’m not sure which brand is the first one to set up a FB or twitter account, but I’m hundred percent sure this guy is a genius. After that everybody just follows, creating an account, writing interesting posts and interacting with fans. That’s what we call the social media marketing trend, brands are trying harness the great influence of online platforms. Initially somebody saw it as another channel of doing Internet Marketing, like offering discounts and coupon, but later they realized that it was totally another story here.Social media is quite different from pure Internet Marketing. Actually you don’t say “come on just now, buy one and get one free” on your brand FB page, it dispels your followers. What you should do is to talk, share, joke, comment like a real person, a friend your followers like to hang out with, a fella your customer could casually talk to. We always say branding is about shaping your brand as a person with characters you favor, and now social media is the perfect tool for it, with which a brand can exactly talk and react like a person.

For inter-personal communication, I was told many times that listening is the key, always. Self-help book authors always say listening and smile are important in building good first impression, because they all show great respect, satisfying the common mental need of feeling the importance of themselves. I’m pretty sure most of us are familiar with this cliches, sometimes we do in this way and things go smoothly, sometimes we surrender to egos and we screw something up. Even for a cocktail party, listening is the key to keep people from leaving after 5 mins. Here’s something we should learn about social media marketing: Listening first. You might dream of hearing the voice of your customers, prospects, and competitors, now you can do that all on social media.

[itsjasonwan21]

Developing a new App, not a easy decision

Mobile first! That’s true. Nobody denies that the widely-spreading smartphones are great tools for marketer. Marketing is about reaching the target customers, we should go to where the consumers are and communicate with them. And now everybody is holding a smartphone, spending plenty of time texting, playing, surfing on the little device, actually it’s getting bigger. That’s why we should go mobile, to reach consumers via smartphones. As a result, Apps, tons of Apps, just emerge, overwhelm the App store on your screen, the number of Apps is growing at a increasingly rapid pace. That’s crazy, just plain crazy.

Developing your own App, sounds really cool doesn’t it? Great brands have their own Apps, Nike has App, Starbuck has App, Zappo has App, even CVS Pharmacy, has app. Many people wonder, how can I just create a brand without its App. But actually, there’re several questions you have to consider before you totally accept the idea of creating an App. The famous blogger Paul Boag just share some insights with us, especially for people who are highly interested in developing a new App.

Firstly, be aware the fierce competition out there. When you get into the iTunes, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by over a million choices of Apps. Probably your brand new app will just be ignored by people, nobody see it and nobody care, if your app is not a completely cool and eye-catching one.

Besides, do you think your cool new App really serve people well? Does it deliver enough values to make it stand out? Does it really solve some problems in our daily life? Users always show no mercy to Apps they don’t use often, because everybody has limited storage space. If they don’t use it, they delete it. So the amount of downloads cannot tell you everything sometimes.

Do you want it to go across multiple platforms or stick to only iOS? Do you want to create a totally native App or a wifi-based app? Creating a whole new App is really a big deal, you have to consider  a lot throughly, other than making a decision blindly.

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SEO, tons of planning behind the scene

One thing that has been repeated for times in Nunzio’s class is that, even if you have great contents, great ideas but nobody knows and sees, it never exists. Now is the time when you can be easily overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of webpages and search results, so doing SEO effectively is becoming increasingly important for savvy marketers. From the insights shared with the guest speaker, Chris Ee, I knew that there’s a lot going on behind the scene, in terms of Search  Engine Optimization.

The good news is that if you post something online, you’ll be found, at least theoretically, while the bad news is the competition out there is crazily intensive, whatever words you google, tons of stuffs just pop out on your screen. Everybody is dying to appear on the first page, and for the big companies, they can throw money in, but for the low-budget start-ups, they need to do something tactical.

Despite everything about algorithm, like meta tag and H1, which I really don’t know well, SEO also contains lots of content-related work, that’s something I really learn from Chris’s talk, that’s something I never know before. For instance, if the hottest word online around Christmas is “GIFT”, and then as a smart blogger, you can write a post about gift buying tips. The rule is, to do some research, hit the sweet spot, and you’ll stand out among the search results. Anyway, content is always the king, even for SEO.

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Primary trigger makes you survive

What can happen within 9s? It’s almost the time for Usain Bolt to finish 100m race. It’s almost the time for the hero and heroine to fall in love in a romantic film. It’s almost the time for a person or a brand to, even not completely, die in your heart.

Sally Hogshead, an author and the CEO of Fascinate Inc as well, told us in her widely spread TED Talk illustrating the power of fascinating others that among tons of competitors out there on a dating websites, you only have 9 seconds to impress your potential match who’s quickly and impatiently going through your profile. OMG, only 9s to survive. So no way of being mediocre, or you’ll the dinosaur after 9s. Then she suggested that you should stay true to yourself, identify and amplify your innate primary trigger, and more importantly, take her Fascination test online.

As a student with psychology background, I was personally interested in her test and I spent 30 something bucks to take it online. Just unlike the tests I got to know in my personality psychology class, like MGBT and Big-Five Model, Sally’s test approaches the mental world from a new while interesting perspective. What’s the primary trigger of yourself, or what’s the main strength you’re born with. The test results told me that my first and second triggers are “Passion” and “Innovation”, namely People and Idea should be the two pillars I build my career and life upon. A-huh, that’s exactly me. Telling jokes, coming up with ideas and interacting with people just work for me, it takes me few effort and I do it well. That’s exactly Sally’s point, if you obsess the “Innovation” trigger, try to show your sense of humor in 9s. If you’re born with Power, then your charisma.

Embrace your own identity, your visceral triggers, is the strategy to make you survive, not only in 9s. It’s the same for a brand. If you’re McDonald, don't go too far away from your identity saying “we offer the healthiest salad”. “I’m lovin it”, that’s the word works.

Feb, 2015

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Designer, Balancer

When it comes to designers, people always associate them with artistic guys with trendy looks. That’s the general stereotype. But actually, designing is much more expanded than art creating, engineers and IT geeks could be designer as well. For example, according to the article “Design Thinking”, Thomas Edison is a “designer” because of his distinguished experimentalism. It’s about the mindset. It’s about thinking.

Besides, designer is about seeking the balance between the creative side and the analytical side. They have to be the scientist and artist at the same time, they think about both the aesthetic and functional aspects during their work. It’s no doubt challenging, since people is usually supposed to be strong at either left brain or right brain, but brilliant designers can do both. It’s hard but amazing.

It just reminds me the spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. His work has well known for being daring, imaginative, even gaudy. But actually he’s also a great balancer, for example his masterpiece Casa Mila and Casa Ballot, are both combinations of practical functions and aesthetic value.

Feb 15th

NYC

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Morgen Museum, Manhattan

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Copenhagen

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Brooklyn Bridge

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Fifth Avenue

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Manhattan, NYC

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The most Important thing I learnt for the first class, ONLY THE INTERESTING SURVIVES

Today, marketing comes in all shapes, all sizes and everywhere. You don’t have to work in a prestigious ad agency, you don’t have to be David Ogilvy or Don Draper, all you need is a laptop, a smart brain, and most importantly, being open-minded. You can just set up a blog posting nice pictures, or build up a video podcast. The point is that, you have to got something interesting.

We are exposed to tons of information everyday, so only the interesting stuff stands out, only the interesting stuff survive. As professor Esposito said in the first class, story telling and content is the king of doing marketing, because the market place changes a lot over time. You don’t have to tell customers everything about the product within a 30s TV commercial, they’ll google it if they are INTERESTED.  So, to be interesting, or die.

As a marketer anyway, being interesting yourself is highly favored, because interesting person telling interesting stories makes everything easier. And for myself, “You are an interesting person” is the thing I want to hear most. They might say "Only the strong survives", but what I want to say is "Only the interesting survives". 

Feb 8th, 2015

NYC

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Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid

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Copenhagen