Facebook is experimenting with a new way to react to a post. Rather than just “like,” people can pick an emoji that better expresses their reaction — when “like” just doesn’t fit.
I don’t know if this will work, but it’s smart for Facebook to experiment with new things. Their model is based on engagement, so if posting a silly cartoon face makes people feel more engaged … so be it.
This got me thinking about how content providers are constantly trying to understand their audience, and where things might be heading for content.
In the old days, selling content mostly meant selling books or newspapers. The cover, or the headline, or whatever the paperboy yelled in the streets, generated interest and affected sales. A few people might write letters to the editor, and there might be some buzz in the pub about a salacious story in the paper, but user feedback was fairly limited and not very scientific.
There were surveys and focus groups and such, but they simply weren’t that great.
Once the web came along, content creators had the opportunity to get a lot more data. At first it was mostly hits and visitors. Then page views and time on site. “Engagement.” Comments. Backlinks. Social sharing.
Some sites had specific tasks they wanted users to perform. Click on this. Sign up for that. Buy this other thing.
Web designers tweaked colors and presentation and words to get the best response. Which type of button makes the user more likely to buy? How can I reduce friction on this page? What words will make the reader more likely to share this story, or comment on it?
The data the website collected from the user was limited to a few things in the client / server request and response (IP addresses and such) and to specific actions the user took. Cookies and logins allowed analysis of users over multiple visits, and publishers were able to collect a lot of interesting data on users.
As more players got in on the act — and users got cookied from lots of different sites — data from other services could be added to the basics any given site collected. So, for example, there are companies that can give the demographic profile of a site’s visitors, and the site can use that data to fine-tune its content and its advertising.
That’s the sort of thing that makes many people nervous, but it’s also making the web experience far more robust and customized.
With smart phones, the data a website can collect has expanded considerably, and when you include apps, it gets really crazy. Apps can collect all sorts of personal data on the user.
Think of the implications all this will have for “reader apps” — things like the Kindle reader, for example. The publisher could see if you read (or at least paged) all the way through the article or book, how quickly you paged through, and how much time you spent at it. Amazon doesn’t give publishers that data right now, but it could.
If the book truly kept you up all night, Amazon and the publisher could know that. Things like “a real page turner” and “I couldn’t put it down” could go from throwaway lines in a review to objective facts.
With more data, and more ability to analyze that data, content creation will change dramatically.
What if your smart phone is connected to a fitbit, or some other device that monitors your vitals. Could a publisher see if your heart rate increased on page 25?
How invasive is this going to be? Will your smart refrigerator tell your smart phone that you went and got a beer after reading the scene in the corner bar? And will that become a selling point? Will Budweiser sponsor content that’s shown to increase beer consumption?
It sounds crazy, but it’s not at all far-fetched. The new revenue source for content might not be the cover price or the subscription, but the data about the user.
It makes you wonder if you really want to be wearing that mood ring with the bluetooth connectivity.
As an author, I would love to know how readers are reacting to different parts of a book. It may not be long before I can get that.
If a lot of readers are slowing down on the second paragraph of page seventeen, maybe the text is a little cumbersome. And if too many people are stopping after chapter eight, maybe I need a new hook to keep the story going.
I would like to know if people laughed at my jokes, or if their heart raced during the action scenes. I don’t write that kind of stuff, but other authors might be interested in other biological reactions to their stories.
How is this flood of information going to change storytelling and content, and what implications does it have for devices and the apps that run on them? I don’t know if we can say that the content will be better, but we can certainly say that it will be more finely tuned to measurable reactions.