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Mark Wahl


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Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA

Organizing principles for systems:
Anti-utopian social networking (20070730)

First, some background.

Tupperware parties, undercover marketing and viral marketing

The party plan is a marketing technique developed by Brownie Wise in the early 1950s, initially for selling Tupperware (tm) plastic storage containers.

The 1995 documentary Tupperware!, on the history and impact on Tupperware in American culture, provides a basic description of how the parties start. The documentary includes excerpts from a party plan short training film; quoting from the transcript,

Woman 1: I've heard a little about this kind of party, but I've often wondered how it works.

Woman 2: Well here's the idea. All you have to do is invite about twelve or fifteen of your friends to drop over some afternoon or evening for a party. And I'll help you put it on. Tell them we'll have lots of fun.

Woman 1: And then I suppose you take orders from the guests?

Woman 2: Yes, but no high-pressure selling. None of your friends will be embarrassed into buying.

A goal of the plan was that anyone (but typically women) could become a participant in this business as a party host or hostess. The background FAQ for the film discusses some of the advantages of the model: low barrier to entry, and leverages existing and emerging interpersonal connections:

Through all these changes [brought on by WWII], women retained important social networks, keeping up with other women through their churches, neighborhoods, and families. Female relatives still provided most child-care for absent mothers. These were the same sort of female networks that had shaped the 19th century anti-slavery and suffrage movements, contributed to the union movement of the early 20th century, and enabled women to move from country to city during the war. These connections would, in turn, be critical to Brownie Wise's marketing strategies, as she built the Tupperware home party business on top of relationships created at church socials and back-fence friendships. (emphasis added)

  
(from PBS)

A sales brochure illustrated how the scope of selling can grow beyond immediate friends:

Betty: Everyone needs and wants Tupperware. And don't forget your beauty operator, your milk man, your grocer, butcher, service station attendant, your doctor... in other words, everybody you see every day.

Ann: What about the P.T.A.? I know some people there.

Betty: Exactly! You're getting the idea. In other words, wherever you go, you will meet people who are prospects for Tupperware parties.

Participating in a Tupperware party is a 'voluntary' experience, driven by the participant's interest and sense of social obligation. And the product demonstration and order-taking is an evident and 'fun' part of such a party. Everyone there knows that selling is occurring.

By contrast, in undercover marketing, the goal of the marketer is to inform the potential customer without the potential customer being aware they are being targeted. The 1998 movie The Truman Show takes this to extremes, as an analysis from Transparency at transparencynow.com by Ken Sanes suggests

Since the television program that is [Truman Burbank's] life plays nonstop, without commercial interruption, it has to makes money through product placement. Advertisements are not-so-seamlessly woven into dialogue and scenes, turning Truman's life into a continuous commercial, as well as a form of entertainment...

Taking the point one or two steps further, we can say that the media would have us live inside a world of fiction that is the most glorious commercial ever devised, for a system in which life, sales, and entertainment are interfused. "Product placement" and testimonials for this emerging system of entertainment-marketing capitalism are being seamlessly woven into our lives.

 

Look what I got for you at the checkout. It's a Chef's Pal. It's a dicer, grater, peeler all in one. Never needs sharpening. Dishwasher safe.

In viral marketing, the potential customer and the current customer are enlisted to pass on the marketing message they've received. The prospect caught up in viral marketing may be aware and actively want to "spread the word", might be a carrier who is unaware of how they are being used, or might be aware of their participation in the activity and not be able to do something about it.

An example of the third category of viral marketing is a public emailing service that automatically attaches ads to outgoing messages. Hotmail, one of the earliest uses of viral marketing on the Internet, is discussed in the 2001 paper "Applying Quantitative Marketing Techniques to the Internet" by Alan Montgomery of CMU:

An alternative promotional campaign was suggested by one of Hotmail's venture capitalists, who advocated placing an advertising message, "Get your free e-mail at Hotmail," with a hyperlink back to Hotmail at the bottom of every outgoing e-mail. The recipient would know that the e-mail message came via Hotmail and its use would be an implicit endorsement of the service. The more e-mail messages a Hotmail subscriber sent, the more advertising would be distributed. Every recipient would become a potential new subscriber. Initially the founders were against this type of promotion, thinking that their users would be repelled by any advertising, but they had few other advertising options.

One reason for the success marketing campaign is that it was the only one of its kind, as Ellen Neuborne wrote in her 2001 BusinessWeek article " Viral Marketing Alert!":

My inbox occupies an ever-bigger slice of my hard drive. If viral marketers have their way, in addition to my daily dose of e-mails from companies pitching junk, I'll get another pile passed on by friends. It'll be cute once, maybe twice. But there's a viral traffic jam lurking just a few clicks down the Information Highway. Even good friends can be as annoying as marketers if they bombard me too much. Companies think viral marketing will cut through the clutter, but if they come en masse, they'll be the clutter.

Utopia as a goal for social networking

There is a long tradition of attempts to create utopia social experiements, particularly in the United States. Typically these involve communal living of unrelated individuals and some form of central governance and control over societal behaviors, and many of these attempts have failed. Robert C. Ellickson wrote in 2001 in the draft "The law and economics of the household" that

The enduring appeal of utopian alternatives to the conventional household hints that humans have an evolved psychological yearning for a return to the conditions of the hunter-gatherer band. Like a sweet tooth, this yearning can prompt maladaptive decision-making under contemporary conditions. (p. 32)

One persistent example alternative household structure "design pattern" he cites is the "group quarters":

Examples are dormitories, fraternities and sororities, and abodes for members of religious orders. Group quarters exploit efficiencies of scale in the production of food, shelter, and social activities, but at the price of major sacrifices in autonomy and privacy. A consensual group quarters thus disproportionately attracts those who are young and impecunious. (p. 33)

It is possible to consider social networking web sites as being "utopian", for example in that many

Marketing in social networking

Marketing techniques used in social networking sites seem to follow party plan, undercover and viral marketing strategies.

For one example of marketing in social networking, Google Gmail includes advertisements in the display of a page alongside emails being read, and targets these advertisements based on the content of the email. Google says that By offering Gmail users relevant ads and information related to the content of their messages, we aim to offer users a better webmail experience. For example, if you and your friends are planning a vacation, you may want to see news items or travel ads about the destination you're considering.

Furthermore Google goes out of their way to stress, in a apology page for Gmail ads, that people actually want these advertisements:

Many people have found that the search-related ads on Google.com can be valuable--not merely a necessary evil, but a welcome feature. We believe that users will also find Gmail's ads and related pages to be helpful, because the information reflects their interests. In fact, we have already received positive feedback from Gmail users about the quality and usefulness of our ads and related pages.

For another example, in Facebook there is an ad region consistently on the left side of every page, below the link to the home page and links to applications:

And Facebook also interpolates ads in the middle of a 'news story' about a subject's friends:

It is interesting to note that the icon for this "news item" is a megaphone (to suggest that amplification to reach a wide audience is necessary), and unlike every other interesting news story about friends, the item has a "Share" button to permit the subject to send it to their friends or add it to their profile. There's no obvious indication of why a participant might want to include an ad for a credit score in their profile when they are not permitted to include in their profile non-advertising news items about their friends, such as a notice of a birthday or a party, or significant life events such as marriages or job changes.

Anti-utopian social networking

The Wikipedia article on dystopias mentions a distinction between an anti-utopia and a dystopia, that is derived from a 1998 Random House article on the word "dystopia":

...for example, dystopia is used to mean 'a horrible place', while anti-utopia is used to mean 'a place or society intended to be utopian but that has been perverted and is now horrible'.

An anti-utopian social networking site would have some flaw that "spoils" it, and one flaw could be the misapplication of these marketing strategies.

This flaw might arise from a mismatch of expectations between the operators and participants of the social networking service, in particular where the operators see it as vehicle for selling advertisements, and the participants have goals unrelated to being marketed to.

For example, a cognitive disconnect in the real world would occur when a group of friends engaged in a ordinary discussion in one of their houses realize that they have been brought into a Tupperware party without realizing it, when the hostess starts bringing up topics of conversation concering food storage options and demonstrating various plastic containers.

In an anti-utopian social networking site, participants might feel "trapped" by incessant, annoying, or unnerving marketing, without a vehicle for escape or subversion. While the site operators might argue that no one is forced to be part of the social networking site, this is not always in practice true, due to factors discussed in the earlier post "Modelling the effects of interoperability", or scenarios such as: a corporation holding a training course in a virtual reality environment, or a university relying upon a social networking site to disseminate news to its students.