I have a project that I'm working on this year that synthesizes a variety of work that I've been doing for about the past decade or so. So there's lots of different pieces that come together. So there are, I'm not going to contextualize actually what I, well I am, I'll contextualize a little bit about my background. I started off in the humanities as an English professor and did that for several years and now teach in engineering at the University of Washington in a department called technical communication. So what my work does is it brings together both humanities and social science and more technical aspects from engineering and thinking about design. And most recently what I've been doing is work in the developing world or emerging markets. I know the term developing world is problematic, we can talk about that later, but so doing work about what use, the technology usage patterns around the world and what we can learn from looking at what people do with technology when they start using it. Okay. So there are lots of different threads here, but the overall story goes something like this. I'm going to give you the punch line up front. And so essentially we've gotten quite adept at talking about user-generated content as a source of creativity and resistance, okay? And what I'd like to do is call these hacks, all right, just for the purposes of making vocabulary a little bit easier. If you think about mashups, it's kind of hacking, okay? Making things do maybe what they weren't originally designed to do. We know how to analyze the cultural impact of these hacks in a sophisticated and theoretical fashion, and we've known how to have that conversation since before digital content, as it turns out, back in the analog days. And what I want to do is connect this kind of analysis to technical hacks to make the claim that user-generated adaptation of technology artifacts themselves is also a source of creativity and cultural resistance. There's increasing amounts of work being done on this, including by some of the fellows at the center. And what I want to do today is focus on two sites of innovation in order to talk about technical hacks. And the first is, well, with both of these, it's what people do with technology in all sorts of places. And so the first of these is looking at emerging markets or the developing world context. And the second is looking at community spaces, aka hacker groups, okay? And to accomplish this, what we need to do is shift our thinking in two specific ways. The first is rather than looking at emerging markets as, say, from an academic way to address digital divide issues or from a commercial angle to think about how to make new devices that can be sold to the bottom of the pyramid, instead thinking about what goes on in emerging markets as bottom-up innovation that can contribute to more creative design generally. So that's the first shift in thinking about why bother going to the two emerging markets and looking at what people are doing with technology. And the second is I want to recuperate the term hacker, which is both more complicated and more important than one would think. And there are lots of definitions of the word hacker. The Q&A that Amer had sent me some questions that I responded to that were on the website, and one of them was, how do you define hacker? And I have my own very specific definition, and I would love to debate that with people. But what I want to do is I want to change the terms of what we think of in terms of hackers, because there's an increasing movement to protect ourselves against hackers and hacking that I think in the long run can threaten innovation. And so the conversations that we have about making sure that intellectual property and copyright allow people to be creative online and to create meaningful content, essentially I'm arguing that we should extend these discussions to ensure that they include the technical side of innovation as well. So these are some of the things that I'm going to talk about today. These are the only words that you're going to get in the presentation, so savor them. So for several years I've been doing research on differential patterns of technology use. Questions like how does age or gender or race affect one's willingness to use a specific technology, and once a technology is adopted, how does identity and subjectivity affect both usage patterns and then any adaptations that users go through? So the question of adoption and adaptation, particularly as intervention, so that's sort of an important point, that adoption and adaptation of technology is a kind of intervention in it, is tied to work that I started many years ago back before the internet had pictures, for those of you who, like me, might be grizzled enough to remember that. So while the digital age has made creative repurposing of cultural artifacts easier to execute and perhaps more widespread, is by no means a new process. So what it remains though is just really spectacularly consonant with early examples of, say, slash fiction or other kinds of fan fiction. The work of people like Tanya Medlesky, Dick Hebdig, and Henry Jenkins, critics who looked at modes of individual resistance to scripted consumer roles. And so where this goes, essentially, is that for those of you who are interested, well, yeah, I'm not sure how many people here are interested in the theoretical underpinning of the argument, but it's taken from work on subjectivity, combining strands of postmodern feminism with the work of people like Paul Smith, work that details the tension between being a constructed agent and a subject with agency, that push pull of identity formation and how one navigates through institutional and cultural forces. So I don't actually think that this is the format for an extended theoretical discussion of subjectivity. Happy to chat with you later if you want to go in that direction, but there's no easier way to put people to sleep during and after lunch. So let me just say that my own work in this area, back when I started in the early days, concerned women who write romance novels, and I don't know, yeah, it's a tiny, tiny print, but that's their web page, and a national writer's organization called the Romance Writers of America. And that work was an examination of the complicated role negotiation that women would go through as they moved from being readers to becoming writers, so from being consumers to becoming producers, consumers of that cultural artifact to producers of a variant artifacts that reflected more closely their narrative or creative values that reflected their selves back into the text. And I raise this because the arguments about digital creation are not necessarily new, and in fact, you can see some of the same scholars moving from analog critiques to digital critiques, Henry Jenkins sort of primary among them. So you may ask what do romance writers have to do with computer use in Cambodia and Uzbekistan, which is a fair question. And so those romance writers, as well as the fan fiction writers and zine producers and all those folks who were essentially doing user-generated content back before we had computers, worked their way from being passive consumers of cultural products to producers of artifacts with themselves and others as the audience. And it's exactly that dynamic that I want to draw attention to. The dynamic that says I will not passively consume. I will instead make this object, whether it's a book or a song or a game or a device, meaningful to me. I'll add my voice to what it is, and I'll speak back to it. And that blended conversation is an amazing moment of creativity and innovation. So what we're going to talk about is kind of a wide, disparate variety of areas where that conversation takes place. So the ease of production enabled by digital tools makes these conversations seem in some ways almost mundane. We've been having, we were the person of the year last year and user-generated content, fuels and industry, et cetera, et cetera. And I do think it's increasingly valuable to make the assertion that those acts of cultural production and resistance are important, particularly in an environment where one might argue the cult of consumerism has gained an especially strong following. And as I mentioned, we've become quite adept at those theoretical readings of resistance to technology and to cultural narratives and to complex analyses of user-generated content. But in some ways, the user-generated content of the analog age or the digital age can also be seen as a usage model of media. These are analyses of how users adopt a medium in their lives and how they adapt it to their needs. So adoption and adaptation are twin frames for analysis. What do people choose to use and what do they use it for? And then the sort of two other questions, the invisible questions embedded in that, is what do they choose not to use and what possibilities are foreclosed for them because they don't use it? So from a technical angle, what I started doing, or from a more technical angle, I got interested in this larger question of what kind of patterns do we see and who's using what when it comes to technology. And that was, what do they use it for? Are there any kind of narratives of cultural resistance and why do they use it at all? So I started looking at race and gender in the US and then I thought, oh, well, this is really interesting and there were very early internet initiatives going on in Uzbekistan, back in the late 90s, which is when I was doing this work. So for some reason, I chose to go to Uzbekistan back in 2000 and started this project there. So, okay, let's talk about Cambodia for starters. And then the rest of them, I'm just going to lump Central Asia. I'm going to just sort of talk about Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan together. And if you really want to know what's happening in what country, you can ask me about specific pictures, I'll let you know. So talking about, what I want to do now is talk about the patterns of technology adoption and adaptation going on in a variety of countries. So people in diverse contexts, and in my research group at UW, we use the phrase resource constrained environments. I run a group called Design for Digital Inclusion, and we sort of talk about that notion of resource constraint rather than specific locations because a lot of the arguments are relevant domestically as well. So here are some of the ways that people use technology. And what I'm going to do with these uses that I'm going to discuss is link them to that notion of hacks, okay? The notion of technical hacks, changing how stuff is supposed to work so that it works the way one wants or needs it to work. That these are moments of creativity, moments of innovation to pay attention to. So one of the things that people do is they use older technology and they figure out how to make it work. So if you look at that picture up there, what you see are examples of some pretty antiquated technology being used in the past couple years. And what's happening is that people figure out how to make slower processors, less memory, older operating systems work for them, okay? They cobble things together, they figure it out. One of the things that they also do is they share systems that we think of as a one per user system. So if you travel anywhere in the developing world you'll see this model where you have multiple users grouped around one computer. And a user then gets to find in different ways. So I may actually go with some friends and sit next to a computer and never ever touch a keyboard but I may still think of myself as an internet user, okay? Because I'm interacting with the medium. So I may be literate in Uzbek but not so good with Russian and have no English at all. But I might visit an internet cafe regularly with one of my sons who types messages for me to customers or relatives. I may be a regular surfer of news sites but I can't necessarily afford too much internet time. So my friends and I pool money to buy an hour or two and then we sit together and read our favorite sites. I may be fascinated by computers but have no idea why I might spend my money on internet sites at all that primarily have news about other countries and so I may log on to instead to do something like download a ringtone for my phone. And all of those are definitions of being an internet user. So people also use technology not just for entertainment or for education and not just for political mobilizing in advance of the next election but they may use it for other things. So for those of you who don't read Cyrillic the top line says internet cafe and that's the name of the internet cafe. I like this picture a lot. So we have all these various usage scenarios but one of the best hacks that I've seen in the internet cafe system over the years has to do with games. So here we have bread and counter strike for sale together and essentially what we've seen over the years is that games fuel the growth of internet cafes and the internet industry in a variety of places. So what you get is really kind of swanky places that look like this. I should play this game with Ivan of guess that country. It's been to all these places. So you get places where people come in so you get businesses that open in a community they'll open in a neighborhood and the internet is really really expensive to use and most people actually can't necessarily afford to use it and so what they'll do is in addition to having internet access they'll also be games which run over a land or single player games and there may also be movies that you can watch on site and other kinds of and sometimes the ring tone stuff goes on in these places. So maybe there's not so many internet customers maybe there's no internet customers to begin with. So how does a business stay open. So what they do is they offer games and then kids come in and play games and what that sign up there shows is a pricing structure three tiered pricing structure. So to play games which is the first line that you see up there is one sum an hour to use the internet is two and a half sum an hour to be online is also one sum an hour and online is things like doing I am and so there's what you're seeing is a reflection of an ISP practice where it's metered by megabyte download. So essentially if you're doing online activities that don't constitute downloading things then it's a lot cheaper. So but this is actually very very recent and so earlier there would just be two pricing structures. So you have this cafe that's open some business that's open in a community kids come in they play games they can't afford internet but what that means is when there's someone in the neighborhood who does actually need access to the internet and has the money to pay for it that that business is extant in the community. Someone can walk through the door and get access to the resources. So offering the gaming becomes a way it becomes a viable business model it becomes a workaround in terms of social expectations about the purpose of technology particularly in emerging regions. So if you look at for example what NGOs do and what they tend to fund when they fund internet projects pretty much across the board games are banned I mean I think you could you could be pretty comfortable making that claim in lots and lots of places but in fact it's gaming that that makes it a viable industry in the commercial sector well and porn but you know we all know porn fueled everything for the internet so so one of the other things that they do is create customer basis by having so that says computer club and what it is it's a sign for a StarCraft competition and so they have local gaming groups and local game competitions and for those of you who follow the world cyber games which is the computer gaming Olympics the countries of central asia have placed very well so I'm startling what Lee well over the years in part because of activities like this one of the other things that I've seen over the years this is actually one of my favorite stories world of war stan so how many people know what world of warcraft is how many people play world of warcraft oh come on on up to it really no one occasionally so world of warcraft you all know what it is lots and lots of people play it lots of people are in the game world requires internet access you interact with people you go on group quests a lot of the gameplay is predicated on transactions all kinds of transactions including through an auction house where things are listed for sale and then you buy them in order to get better armor better goods etc so the internet access in the region it's pretty expensive and so what's happened is in a couple of the regional cities regional capitals the local ISPs have set up their own rogue servers their own world of warcraft servers so if you subscribe to the local DSL within the city you can play world of warcraft as much as you want if you pay hourly but you can only play against people who are located in your city and since you're not a room full of world of warcraft players what I'll tell you is the game is fundamentally very very different if there are only 200 people who belong to the universe rather than the thousands or tens of thousands that you would see on a regular commercial server so things like the basic mechanics of gameplay that blizzard built up for world of warcraft literally don't work the same way a lot of them don't work at all and yet there are these devotees people play the game they make it work within their within their infrastructure environment so this is um they've also actually made up their own their own rules here but i'm not gonna oh my computer's thinking it's thinking there we go okay so here's another um we can talk about telephone hacks and system hacks so this is what the public telephone infrastructure looks like in some places and so this is a a hack that people have developed to get around that so the phone up there uh belongs to the person who lives uh along the sidewalk whether it's a home or business and what they do is they run the phone out from their home line to the phone booth when you want to make a call you go give them some money you make a call and at the end of the day when they go to sleep they unplug the phone and take it into their house with them okay so again so routing around of the system so then there's the whole cell phone issue and the way in which uh cell phones work and what i would like to say about this is less about central asia and more about the studies that have been done generally about the developing world and all of the really fascinating sms-based uh applications that have been developed in order to help people scaffold the their needs of everyday life so you get these uh sms pricing structures you know are folks familiar with the with those are so essentially if i'm a farmer um and actually use the fishing example so uh it's been done in a couple countries so i i'm going out to fish um i can use my cell phone to send an sms to find out what the price of different fish is that day so that i can fish for the fish that will fetch the best price and then when i'm ready to go back to shore i can find out what the price is at different markets so i can bring my boat to the market where i'm getting the best price for the fish that i caught that day okay um their cooperatives that use pricing structures um there's all kinds of information services as well as these kinds of agricultural services that have been developed for cell phones this is a um maybe a less um a less socially redeemable hack but so Tajikistan has oh four million people four or five million people up to six okay six million people and they have about nine mobile phone companies so we've got one two three four five six gsm here and then there's another three cdma companies that exist in a country of six million people and what's happened is the mobile providers have been very adept at figuring out how to adapt their services to the needs of the country and so it's very mountainous it's pretty hard to um put those towers up in parts of the region but then you'll get cell phone companies that operate oh solely say on the border with afghanistan and you can think of what niche market they're accommodating there with that customer base uh voice over ip internet telephone is another way like games that internet cafes are having revenue come in another way that they're sustaining and i'm going to try to accelerate my talk a little bit here oh okay right so before we go on i'll say so these are all creative adaptations to technology making it work technically and socially within a given context that they're innovative applications as well models that can be adapted elsewhere to grow industries and doing research in emerging markets or the developing world can do more than contribute to an understanding of the digital divide it can do more than identify markets such investigations can provide valuable insights into patterns of innovation and they can do far more than user-centered design strategies in terms of generating creative design okay so that's sort of another subtext here and uh in the work that i'm doing sort of what traditional user-centered design or participatory design contributes to the story so in the abstract for this talk i i did promise to discuss theories of subjectivity and axe grinders in the same breath so there's the most unflattering photo in the universe but it is about an axe grinder so there you go so i started the talk by discussing content mashups um as a form of resistance to cultural forces and we do have that sophisticated way of discussing those kinds of content intervention content interventions into dominant forces and how does a content mashup or user generated content citizen journalism for example big topic around here um how does that constitute resistance kind to institutions and to uh kind of narrow channel cultural discourse and what i'm trying to do is bring the same recognition of resistance to technical mashups the examples that i've been showing have all been kinds of technical hacks mashups of systems and sort of going back to the original work that i did with race and gender where that work really started was thinking about interface design and how user interface either accommodates uh or encourages certain users based on different identity elements how does it encourage the participation of certain users and not encourage the participation of other users and so bunch of folks have written about that about how user interface design is sort of culturally situated and makes assumptions about who users are um so uh so what i'm trying to do now is draw attention to how important those moments of technology technical intervention are whether it's designing a new ui or some of the other things we'll see here and also that these kinds of interventions are not necessarily predicated on our cane expertise just as user generated content is not the purview only of domain experts okay so this is the leap to that second community of innovation that i want to focus on and precisely for their contribution to conversations about creativity this is the i'm not going to say anything more about ict for d i'm gonna or the the emerging market stuff i'm gonna go into the second community because the time is a waist in and i want to say that this is kind of an accidental part of the story this is actually a really important point i never intended for this stuff to be part of my scholarship this came out of uh just what i started doing in my life um you know that whole free time thing that sometimes we have free time and we do things that aren't associated with our work and so i started doing this and hanging out with this group of people and came to realize that the sorts of activities that we were engaged in i won't say they i'll say we uh we're really resonant with the work that i was doing in emerging markets and a lot of the conversations that people were having about digital technology and what innovation what constitutes innovation so so uh so here we go so i'm going to talk about hackers and the argument that i've been making for years regarding research um in other communities that those patterns of adoption of technology adoption and adaptation um speaking more plainly how users hack systems and make them usable or relevant um is an argument that can be made to hacker communities and the whole diy community and um so these are some of the things that we do we do use a lot of screwdrivers and a bandsaw this is a pcb printer and uh what it allows you to do is uh print out plans for soldering up a pcb board it's a great way of uh building stuff yourself in a cheap way we launched a high altitude balloon so we uh got up to about a hundred and seven thousand feet and um we did lots of electronics and um putting together a variety of cameras and uh we made sure the payload was pink because it had lots of wires and scary-looking things and when it landed in eastern washington uh we didn't know what people would think um so we there are a whole bunch of us and we spent a couple weeks uh doing this and trying to figure out how you could do new things with photography and how you could do uh get video and do tracking through various mobile technologies we do things like play with ferrofluid i don't know if you know what ferrofluid is but it's pretty cool stuff and uh if you it if you run a magnet underneath it on the like on the other side of this little tupperware you'll get these incredible patterns there uh it's remarkable stuff uh uh we do some things like uh build power tool drag racers okay for power tool um races which is a weird thing uh we one of one of the one of the folks built a tesla coil you know what a tesla coil is okay and actually one of the really interesting things that i learned about tesla coils is is while it's running if you walk out with the fluorescent light bulb and you get close enough it'll light up it just just from ambient electricity and so this is all a kind of experimentation and uh there sometimes it is just like the whole tesla coil experimentation is just sort of learning how electricity works and what can we do with it but then there's stuff that's more purposeful so this is an rfid tag and one of the things that we've been doing is thinking about rfid and some of the social implications and that's that's actually my other berkman project is all about rfid and and other kinds of security issues and writing software and hardware and doing some examination into what some of the vulnerabilities are of rfid technology oops a daisy which constitutes not just playing like you might make the argument with the balloon or the tesla coil but also looking at what some of the policies are that regulate how we move through our everyday life so those credit cards that you have when you get your new credit card maybe it has an rfid chip in it do you have any idea of what those true vulnerabilities are about that rfid chip that's in your credit card and those are some of the things that we're trying to figure out because frankly no one else is really trying to figure it out for us so it's this kind of alternate community of research and discovery but what's happening for the folks who do this kind of work is that increasingly what they do and the questions that they ask are being constructed as illegal okay so and that's sort of that's the intervention that I really want to try to try to fight back against so there is this little story on boing boing about the car calendar I mean I'm sure some of you read it that some folks who Wendy's laughing so folks who they'd kitted out their cars and there was a car group and they wanted to make a calendar with pictures of their cars and then they got a cease and desist from Ford saying no you cannot have pictures or I guess actually Kathy Press refused to print the calendar saying they would be in trouble you can't take pictures of your car even though you bought it and you own it and as many modifications as you've done to it any picture of your car actually doesn't belong to you so what you own you don't actually own speaking of cars if you were the kind of person who wanted to work on your car and you had a somewhat recent car you can't actually legally work on your car not because the mechanics are too difficult but because it's wrapped up in really proprietary software that you can't get access to not that you necessarily want to copy the software you don't necessarily want to access to the source code but maybe you just want to work on your car because you own your car you should be able to work on your car or maybe you own an iPhone and you really wish it had an app that helped you oh I don't know name some sort of task of everyday life that you would like to accomplish more usefully and that application is not available in the world so okay I'm going to go ahead and build that app I actually can't build that app and load it onto my cell phone or load it onto my iPhone without it becoming a liability in the future for when Apple updates the firmware and it's not because Apple necessarily is marketing an application that does the same thing and they want to make money off of it they may say well we're not developing this app and we may never develop this app but you still can't develop the app even if you really want it and we're not making money off of it but someday we might want to make money off of it so therefore you can't do it okay so these all of the kinds of mashups or innovation that people would want to engage in increasingly there's a lockdown on that and that's problematic I would say again all the effort that we put into thinking about IP and copyright and ways to protect user generated content and the conversation the textual and digital conversation that happens among users that doing that at the side of technical innovation is just as important so those hacks in the developing world that we looked at are often in response to obviously visible institutional failures so if you think about that empty phone booth that was in Tajikistan and the private sector solution to that problem running the phone line out from the home the work done by hackers is in response to similar failures but failures that are less obvious and less visible there are failures associated with narrowing channels of power increasing passivity on the parts of users increased specialization that tries to make the argument that innovation can only come with expertise and with consumer capitalism taken to its illogical extreme when to purchase something no longer means you own it outright so hackers I would argue whether it's that private phone provider on the street corner or the person writing that new application for the iPhone counter that push to centralize who gets to do what with technology and to push back against the increasing movement to say that the things you purchase that you own aren't actually yours to experiment with to improve or to creatively repurpose and I suppose you can call them these if you want and many people will but that move from user to hacker that point when one becomes an actual builder and builds value and creativity and possibility is worth rethinking and rethinking what actually does get thefted in that process and whether we want to in fact recuperate that movement from one role to another and identify what's positive in it I'm done and there's things Yes Keith So I'm curious about the motivations of the hackers that you're hanging out with versus the developing world hackers that you and I both do a lot of work with and generally speaking the reason the developing world hackers hack stuff is because something's badly broken just won't work in that context there's not necessarily a lot of this sort of creative explorative I don't know anyone who races you know belt sanders in Ghana for instance although I know some very very creative hackers do and I wonder if it's sort of a bridge too far in sort of looking for parallels between the two it seems to me like there's something else complicated and political going on with the folks that you're hanging out with that I'm not sure it's entirely fair to ascribe to folks doing this in the developing world is it fair to use the same terminology to talk about these guys or are the motivations so different that it's a mistake to sort of bash them up together so that's a great question I think what I would do is I would go back to the RFID issue and the RFID research that we're doing as the way to build that bridge more effectively so the notion of play like I don't I think that the notion of play is applicable in the developing world when you look at what people do with technology and the kind of personalization that people do with their cell phones it's not all instrumental so they do have that sense of play as well so I don't I don't want to completely erase that but I think that the stronger connection is at the point of the hackers that I hang out with here the research that they're doing they really do see it in response to the fact that institutional structures are not working to either protect them or make sure that technology does the things that they feel it needs to do and that's the same connection to why people are doing the routing arounds in the developing world so a lot of it is perception on their part they see themselves I think engage in a similar kind of now I'm also completely totalizing the community which is inappropriate I mean I you know completely but get back to the economics so I get it I understand that you know people are worried that technology has become increasingly a black box and the only way to do is to fight back against it but you know those screwdrivers cost money so do the bandsaws you know and so do the belt senders that you know you're modifying the drag race right is there an economic motivation associated with this sort of new American rise and hackerdom the sort of big magazine culture it I realize it's now sort of being celebrated to an extent that I haven't been before it's always been present there but I guess I understand that a lot of the people involved with this are very political about it see the political motivations but it's the economics that are of interest is there a common ground on that so some of them are the economic element so Etsy is a good example of the DIY so Etsy is a it's an online store for the DIY community where people sell the things that they make and that's the place where DIY becomes about efficacy for these people and people make a living doing it so it's not just play so the other thing about and this is associated with the security project that I'm doing where I mean I think you can you can break hackers into different categories you can break security researchers into different categories and some of the security researchers including some in this larger community that I'm talking about this research that they do this is part of how they support themselves as well so it's not completely devoid from their professional lives so there is an economic angle to it but I think Etsy is probably the better example this is John from Uptarsta one of the things that I think is is so interesting about this is the moment at which Linux has become ascendant as they kind of embedded software and everything if you go buy a plasma tv today the odds are it comes with a print out of the gpl because it's got Linux on it is exactly the same moment at which you're increasingly not able to hack those things because they're closed in all kinds of other ways and this kind of celebration of the make zine culture comes exactly at the same time as in some way software gets less and less hackable dcma and all that kind of stuff and I guess I wonder what's the kind of relationship of that to these emerging markets in the sense that much of the research that's done on emerging markets as you started out saying is about how do we sell stuff into this new market right how do we how do we feed the bottom of the pyramid with good electronics cheap right and yet kind of you want that research to also have some sense of of this openness so I get I don't have no time formulating it as a question but what do you make of that kind of paradox of sort of hyperattention to this at the same time as nobody's reading is as resistance so I'm not a statistician but I think they have a fondness for the phrase correlation is not causation so I'm not uh I'm hesitant to draw causation but I do think it's interesting that when you have this ascendancy of kind of DIY as people are feeling like they can't see inside any longer and there's that great if you've read was it rainbow's end uh for nirvinge I mean it's this great book where it's wonderful dystopian future where you can't see inside anything and there's this dramatic moment where one of the characters finally you know in a fit of violence gets the hood of a car open and and on the hood of the car it had said no user no user serviceable parts within and then within the car like a it's like a stack of russian dolls you know everyone you open and it says no user service serviceable parts within so this infinite regress of you have no right to to have any kind of intervention but uh I I would agree with you it is extremely interesting I don't know whether one has to do with the other I could speculate about it but it would be pure speculation in terms of the the emerging markets research so one of the things that I found interesting as I've been doing this work for eight years is that people who actually look at emerging markets essentially they care about four countries they care about Brazil Russia India China brick and they don't really care about pretty much any other region the the folks who do the commercial work and because those are where the substantial markets are where they see the return on their investment so I think it's also a little bit disingenuous of me to make this claim about emerging markets research for what I'm doing in central Asia because it is uh it's a convenient connection uh so I'm interested in your uh discussion of the the internet cafes that you know are economically viable because they offer games but also provide useful services alongside and wondering if that offers design suggestions for building modifiability into mass market uh objects so that uh even if they are sold as game boxes they can also serve as internet machines um and how we can do that to reach market scale um on objects that then also have these beneficial side effects I think that's a great point so the assuming that users are not they're not unified they're not coherent or they move through various stages in their usage career with a certain device so Intel has been for example building new kinds of PCs to accommodate usage models in the developing world including multiple users etc um so the the uh the game cafe example for me though also revisits the notion of instrumental uses of technology so a lot of the uh a lot of the emphasis often uh in developing world technology is how can this be useful not how to accommodate play and the fact is like one of the takeaways for me in that in that story is that people do play you know everyone plays and I can go to the you know the smallest dusty town the reason that mobile phones are cheap enough for the fishermen to get them is because lots of people buy them for other reasons to play and uh engage in the banal conversations here uh and the where are you get them to scale that the fishermen can have the same time though that phenomenon of the gaming cafe um is quite specific to Asia don't see the same pattern of Africa um and it's interesting it's it's I remember you know walking in for the first time to a cyber cafe in mongolia and seeing a two-tiered pricing structure going holy cow how the hell did we not think about this in africa but the answer is gaming there is an entirely different business based around old nintendo and old playstation games for you know a quarter of 15 minutes so um but entirely separate markets that have broken off so and then what happens in in at least in these countries is eventually as the market matures the game cafe in the internet cafe is put off and then you'll have separate places where people go for their different uh for their different activities but so in Uzbekistan in ninety nineteen thousand they had the those nintendo cafes as well and what happened is they got replaced by the internet cafes which is interesting so when I was in kenya doing some work I was working with someone who owned a company there and I said let's go to some can we go to some game cafes and he ended up taking me to an old-style arcade that had like a pool table and pinball and uh space invaders and yeah any other questions um I'm interested in in this do-it-yourself group that you're talking about um wherever you run into the law that is where where has somebody said well you can't do this so um I won't say that this is with the group that I've worked with okay I'll just these are some these are some stories that I've been told um if you wanted to find out whether your uh credit card could be read from software that was whether your RFID credit card could be read from just a reader that you can buy off ebay and and software that one could write oneself trying to reverse engineer the so-called um security of that card that um that would be illegal okay that someone might be told that they they uh can't do that reverse engineering legally and I'm actually interested in the I mean I like specifics so who is who is the agent here who who says this is illegal and why is it illegal so I would love to have that conversation with you but I'm not going to do it on the webcast I I will have that conversation with you later um but the reverse mark this is a speech moment reverse engineering is is really dicey in terms of what's legal and what's not I was talking to Phil Malone earlier and he gave some examples of actually of good stories um like the lexmark printer case where um folks did some reverse engineering to route around the lexmark's attempt to mean you could so that you could only use their printer cartridges and lost so because and lexmark had claimed the dmca as saying you know this this is a violation and and the courts actually said no not so much so there's there's some there's some good stuff but I would say certainly the software reverse engineering um and uh the iPhone is another good example actually um but to come back then the law in general would be the dmca that's that's that's yeah that's what I mean about mostly as their concern and if one wanted to mount a defense against this use of the dmca would one try to do it under first amendment or so I'm not a lawyer I don't know how to answer that Wendy would you like to answer that I don't I mean I don't I mean I'm partly I'm thinking you know uh we think of first amendment it's about speech this is about action is there some crossover between speech and action here that so far the successful challenges to the dmca uh in the lexmark case uh or in the chamberlain case where a garage door opener manufacturer was trying to stop people from using their own beepers uh with it uh have been one on the grounds that this is somebody trying to push a copyright protection too far and either they the so-called copyright claimant didn't take all of the steps needed to invoke dmca protection they hadn't locked off all access so you weren't breaking an access control um in order to interoperate with it but the first amendment uh the fences haven't worked so well and and we still need to to keep pushing on the the argument that investigation and learning is part of what's protected by the first amendment and that interoperability shouldn't be prevented but if you can point to a core of copyrightable expression that you're doing the right things to set up technical walls around so far at least the law gives you a fairly strong barrier there well it kind of leads into my question i was going to ask uh whether your project envisions any coming up with any specific legal strategies or arguments for pushing back and uh i would need a collaborator for that since i am not a lawyer okay but this is a very fertile environment for that sort of kind of collaboration so um i i think a series of case studies at least that could be a provide guidance for people would be super useful and that so one of the things that i am doing is so the so the the main project that i set out to do this year was think about privacy and security and do a bunch of kind of ways to educate the public about security risks that are non-academic right not write another white paper but have some kind of public demonstration stuff and and so that's proceeding apace but one of the elements of that has been just talking with folks who do security research and finding out what are the elements of uh what are the kinds of legislation that gets invoked to shut them down and and sort of just doing interviews with folks and and getting their stories about where their professional practice has hit stags and i think that's been really interesting and uh i i think valuable i think collecting that information will be valuable jean i already go back to kind of a theoretical level of questions but in terms of that even the title of your talk today um in terms of producers and consumers and the idea resistance it strikes into the language um kind of implies a certain industrial view of economic activity and that you know the idea of resistance like growing that kind of during the early industrial revolution and sabotaging all the different machines and you know one thing that we talked about a lot here is kind of whether we can move over to more of a common kind of kind of almost a pre-industrial or post-industrial way of looking at an intellectual property i'm wondering if part of what would help us think think about that more would be to try to find a language that's more like i don't know raising or something that that that you kind of taking from the comments rather than using and consuming and resisting which which seems to imply already assumed that there's an intellectual property that that is somehow sacred and and that's really interesting is can you say a little more about that like do you think that would be at all relevant to some of the ways that people talk about like how would you extend that argument to some of the production examples of production here i mean i think here's a little bit harder because you are talking about physical artifacts right in a lot of cases software yeah software yeah software less though so if you're thinking about like kind of a pool of stuff i mean this necessitates legally something else to be able to be in place but like if you're already talking about there's a pool of junk lying in the corner and you're kind of just taking things out of that pile and kind of reconstructing it rather than consuming it or turning from a consumer input rather this is just like a pastor something that we all have have a claim to i'd have the right to go and borrow from and put back into that that would be that would be a different language and saying that you're a producer or a consumer it's just a yeah it's really it's interesting does that is that reflected in in law i mean is it the kind of thing that one can use that model well that is the idea of the comments right so but i'm saying like we if we're kind of pushing the idea of a common thing can we find a way to be consistent about that language um to the level of producer and consumer i don't really know what the alternative i mean i guess it did use to be shepherds or or or cow or cow or whatever um and that the resistance is probably more similar to the era of fencing off the the west i don't know so did you just listen to that yeah so do you so i find that very interesting it's like how would you take that to the developing world it's not on the work you do you're going to duck this one on her out to me i'm a genius so this is a great question a great question you're gonna you're gonna toss it over i think you are well pleased to respond it you know it locks into some questions that i was about to ask you sort of for for my next round of questions which were basically to say whether there's any possibility of sort of solidarity between the two groups that you're talking about and is there a sense in which you ask the american hackers to sort of leverage open this not necessarily because we need a ton of it here because you can make arguments back and forth about just how pressing or just how paranoid these things are but make the counter argument that unless you have this stuff remaining as open as possible it isn't hackable and developable and here i think probably the most useful example in all of this stuff is wireless where if you had really successfully locked down a wireless router technology either through uh through dmca or through technological protection or something along those lines there's an enormous amount of innovative stuff that's been in an african and an asian context as far as ripping this equipment apart and making it possible to do it over extremely long distances and what's interesting is that whether or not you sort of take these community networking projects like you know see you win seriously where you've got you know young american hackers essentially saying you know because corporate capitalism is evil i don't want to use an isp i simply want to use my neighbors and you can simply look at that and say that's very nice and you know get back to me after you've made it through your marxist phase they've managed to advocate in some ways for a level of openness around these products that allows for some really interesting development world style to occur and so i'm wondering if there's a sense in which there are commons arguments based on the importance of the commons not necessarily for those who are directly defending it but for who else the comments are taxed but also it would be a nice time to the notion that the airwaves are a public good right so you think about the way that spectrum is optioned off when you have to privatize that in a certain way but there is still this sort of ruminant notion that the the airwaves are a public publicly owned thing and maybe in the developing or the emerging markets something you can try to preserve at a greater level well yeah you're 20 years too late for that sorry there's this little thing called the itu that took care of that ages ago but it is one of those cases where that's absolutely part of the ideology behind the sort of hackers around the stuff in the US those arguments don't have a ton of traction in the developing world and and so far has been pretty much so good when you have you know Tajikistan with nine mobile phone networks there's problems with having nine mobile phone networks but it beats the crap out of having none which is is what happened before properitization of the spectrum there so because this very difficult argument to make on ideological grounds what's interesting is that the ideological argument would be easier to make in this country but then it has technological openness implications so how does solidarity play out when you're talking about communities that aren't subject to the same legal regime I don't I don't know that it's the legal regime that's the issue I mean you know my work I turn this all into interest and you know focus on the different problems like my my fear about sort of solidarity movements around this is that for the most part American geeks have no freaking clue what the technological challenges are of Uzbekistan or Ghana and therefore tend to get things wrong in those rare cases where you see something that's been designed really well by American geeks in the developing world like the one laptop device it is a rare triumph rather than the norm so for me it's more the environmental questions and the questions of problem identification that would sort of make me resistant to sort of celebrate that movement but I you probably make the same argument for legal regimes if you know we are really obsessed with protection of copyright here it's become an enormous issue and there's an enormous amount of enforcement effort that goes into it just isn't nearly as big an issue in a lot of developing nations at this point you know there's a major entertainment publisher in India that has figured out how to undercut the pirates at the DVD market and are now releasing DVDs licensed IP licensed on them for 20 rupees because they figured out that the pirates were selling them for 35 there's no way to shut down the piracy figured out the only way to continue making a profit as a DVD distributor was to license the content of distributed legal DVDs that are lower than the pirate price but that's a that's a very different so I would explore this notion of solidarity more I mean in the comments I do find that very interesting I will say I completely agree with you that by and large American geeks have no clue about what the technical infrastructure is elsewhere and that's been I mean that's been one of my frustrations so that's why I started this work in so many years ago is watching so much money associated with ICT projects overseas get poured down the drain so there are a couple kind of interesting little initiatives of hackers getting together and trying to put together sort of groups of folks who will help NGOs in the developing world design technology solutions based on what they need I also I don't really know what to make of this but from your comment I mean you and I both know that one of the one of the people that's in the group that I'm talking about here is involved in wireless efforts in the developing world so there are some moments of really effective crossover there and I think that's part of what I'm part of what I'm why I'm trying to connect those two communities every now and then it does happen effectively so there are other questions I know there's a meeting in here in a few minutes but anything else okay thanks very much for your attention


We're inserting patient scenarios that that we're likely to see in the field environment. It allows the team made up of organic med battalion personnel and the HSAP personnel from the military treatment facilities to get in here, work as a team, take care of the patients. This is a great teaching environment. Everybody who knows something is teaching. So exercises like these are really important because they should prepare us for the fight. We train like we fight. We have to get familiar with the equipment. We have to get familiar with receiving a plethora of patients at any moment notice whether it's day or night. We receive the patients, we clear them, we take them into our STP, we give them emergency resuscitative medicine, make sure they're stabilized before they move on to a different area of our STP, i.e. the holding unit or the frisk for surgery, and then we conduct the surgery, we do whatever other interventions are needed, and then we try to get them out as quickly as possible onto a higher echelon care if needed.


Appalachian Wireless now has new forward pay pricing where you can pay up front and get the data and features you design. Five gigabytes of data, just $39.99. Unlimited, just $79.99. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. After being damaged by wind, the iconic Welcome to Weizberg RC-Cola billboard came down this week. But officials here in the city are planning a new life for the decades-old landmark billboard. It was a part of our history and I intend to preserve it. For decades, travelers were greeted with an RC-Cola advertisement that declared Welcome to Weizberg, population 1,534 friendly people, plus two grouches. The billboard sat along Jenkins Road, the former Kentucky Highway 15, at the back entrance to Weizberg ARH hospital. But on Wednesday, city officials took the billboard down after it was damaged by wind. But the billboard wasn't scrapped. It was preserved and Weizberg officials are working on a plan to re-erect the billboard in another location. I am totally committed to preserving the history of this town and of course that was an integral part of our history. When the visible billboard came down, an even older Weizberg billboard was revealed. Weizberg Mayor James Kraft said Weizberg ARH hospital on whose property the billboard sat was instrumental in the billboard being preserved for so long. And he hopes that both billboards can soon rise again. The CEO up there, that lady has been very supportive. They could have torn it down a long time ago and maybe we can separate it and make two signs out of it. Once the white billboard is erected again in a new location, visitors will once again be welcomed to the small mountain town and the debate over just who those two grouches are can finally begin again. In Weizberg, Chris Anderson, EKB News.


In this module, and next several modules, we will talk about genetics. Genetics is a branch of biology in which we study the modes of inheritance, how genetic information is passed from one generation to next. Before we jump into the subject, I would like to give you a brief historic perspective. It had been long recognized that children inherit features from their parents. Humans were breeding plants and animals 5,000 years ago. These people recognized the genetic information is passed from one generation to next. Children offspring take features and characters from their parents. The prevailing view of hereditary was blending, which basically implies that genetic information, once it is passed on to the next generation, it does not separate. I'll give you an example of the principle. For example, we mix two dyes, blue and red. We will get purple dye. Once we have formed the purple dye, we cannot take out red or blue color from this purple dye. Mendel did a lot of experiments. This is a gentleman who basically gave birth to this branch of biology, genetics. Mendel did some experiments which proved that the principle of blending is not valid. It is a particulate principle that is valid. For example, let me tell you, explain it to you in terms of our example, the purple dye. If purple dye, for the sake of explanation, let's say purple dye wants to reproduce. Purple dye can only contribute purple color to its offspring. It will prove that it was incorrect when the purple dye is going to reproduce. It will give, again, the two characteristics, the red and the blue color, will separate in the offsprings and these colors will be contributed by the purple dye, either red or blue, to the offsprings. So basically, it was not something, genetic information was not something that mixed in and was inseparable afterwards. So before we start talking about principles in more detail, let's clarify some of the definitions. A character is an observable feature. For example, color of a flower, the height of a plant, the shape of a seed, the color of the seed, we look at some of these characters. Trade is a particular form of character. For example, white flower, red flower, the flower color is, the flower color is a character and a specific type of character is a trait. So red flower is a trait, color of a flower is a character. Several characters are the ones which are transmitted or are inherited from one generation to the next generation. In the next module, we look at Mendel's experiments and how he came to these conclusions that genetic information, when the individual forms gametes, genetic information separates and is passed on to the gametes in separate packages or particles. We have to keep in mind that back then these experiments were done in mid-1800s to late-1800s. At that time, people did not have the concept of genes, mitosis, meiosis or the chromosomes. So it was a landmark achievement in science that these principles were established purely on mathematics by applying mathematical principles and statistical principles to this discipline.


Hello and welcome to today's webcast. Transforming your customers into your most effective marketing channel. My name is Sarah Gonzalez. I'm an employee of RedBat conferencing and I'll be your host for today's session. Before we get into it I just want to give you guys some understanding of how to interact with the platform that you're viewing on today. If you wish to ask a question simply click on the ask a question icon which is located at the bottom of your screen. You've also got some resources there and we encourage you to complete the survey at the end of the session or before you have to leave by clicking on the survey tab and just to note that today's recording of the session will be sent out within 48 hours of today. So today we're joined by Mark Halper. Mark is the founder of Rec Amazing which does sound amazing. How are you today Mark? Very well thank you Sarah thanks for having me. Great so today we're going to be talking about transforming your customers, the marketing channels available and also advocacy which is huge in what you do at the moment. So can you tell us a little bit about your background? Absolutely. So I've been really fortunate to work in some really innovative places. I've really tried to work in infancy stages of businesses. So everything from creating Australia's largest student databases to helping create some of Australia's first digital agencies. So I've been really fortunate enough to work on the rollout of mobile marketing, the first social pages, a lot of firsts which has seen me just be able to understand from global clients what really they need are and where the market's going. And you've been doing this for over 13 years so you've obviously seen a lot of different marketing strategies and angles and advocacy. Why do you find that the most important? It's been interesting. I think over the last decade we've seen a real shift from brands really looking at their own opinions as being the most important of their own messages being the most important to kind of going actually what the customer tells other people is what's most important and is true reflection. So what we've seen as a result of that and on the slide now I've just got a few comments around that just to showcase how much brands are really taking notice of it. So Net Promoter Score which for anyone that doesn't know is essentially brands all around the world use it as a measuring tool. So it's a question that goes out to the customers saying how likely are you to recommend us based on your experience today? People rate from zero to ten and you'll notice that everywhere now that I've said that. And people who give eight to ten as seen as promoters and the research says these people are really valuable they buy more, buy more often, a higher average way to purchase and CEOs basically use this as a metric to check on the performance of the business and marketing teams go incentivize. So the likelihood of someone to recommend is now one of the most important metrics equal to revenue in a business. We also see social proof so people are saying okay we have our own advertising we have our own media channels and the traditional lines of TV ready on print but really we know what converts better is social proof when you see that your friend has actually been involved or commented or it says that they like a business you know the average add-on Facebook where it's just an ad compared to where you'll see your friends like it has a much higher click through and that that's because of social proof. We know that if there's already human relationship there it converts better. The other thing we see is a move towards advocacy around influences. So we know these people have great change when we used to use influences our own marketing for clients. We throw a much higher click through and conversion when then our traditional ads or PR. But the interesting bit is that my clients used to always say okay we know we have advocates out there we know they're recommending us to friends we can track they've said they've come in through a friend referral but we have no way of knowing when that happened or who it happened by or how influential that person was and who else they told so I found that really interesting space. Yeah definitely. So what is an advocate with all that in mind and if I do stumble on the word advocate don't be a lie it's one of those words that I always stumble with and I have to say it at least 20 times in today's session. So what is an advocate how would you describe one and why are they so valuable to business more now than ever. Sure well an important distinction which is up on the slide now is instead of loyalists people often think an advocate is loyalists as someone who frequently perches from my business and that that might be if you're a charity might be someone who frequently donates and you might be able to track that if they're buying your product online I can see this person buys my product every week fantastic they're a loyalist the difference between an advocate and a loyalist is yes they purchase often and yes they're often more often not advocates are loyalists but an advocate is actually out there recommending your brand to others they are literally your most effective marketing channel they're the most trusted of any marketing message you have and they're out there without incentive trying to convert others to your brand so that's an advocate. Okay and how does the business actually know when they've created an advocate we talk about word of mouth and how hard it is to actually understand what people are saying so that's hard how hard must it be to even know who the advocates are. Yeah it's it's really interesting we there's a lot of overarching research done on advocates and from people who we when we when people are asked do you advocate a brand you recommend a brand you kind of get that research and some some brands do well but more often than not and the majority of businesses find it incredibly difficult to track so the research shows that advocates account for around five to 10% of all our customers and also what shows from their value point of view is that they're five times more valuable than the average customer themselves so where someone is seen to be an advocate and puts their hands up an advocate where the lifetime analysis of their value has been seen they're actually five times more value so they purchase more from your business but not only that they're actually out there recommending others to your business and those referred customers a study was done across 10,000 bank accounts which saw how much value a referred customer brings into the business and as a result they saw referred customers have a 16% higher customer lifetime value themselves so not only are advocates buying more buying more often from you but the people are actually coming in that they referred are actually more valuable as well because they come in with a guard down they go well if my friend has actually recommend you I trust you I won't kick your tires I'm happy to go and purchase things from you and purchase more of your portfolio and what we see as a result is from a marketing sense that it drives if you if you can use marketing and customer experience to drive advocacy it actually converts and value is twice the amount of paid advertising and social media has really changed the game here as well so we know that 81% of consumers are influenced by a friend social media posts so the more you connect advocates with your social media the better great so as a marketer I know how frustrating it is when it comes to trying to attribute things to things and channels and everything like that and like you said it's just getting harder and harder you've got leads coming from everywhere these days and I know the power of word of mouth as well so how how does it all work if I how do I actually find out what people are saying about my brand you know what what steps that can I take to actually make these advocates but also understand what's being said and how can I even track all that information that's coming through yeah it's it's incredibly difficult so as you said it you you have a sense and you probably meet customers and I've told my friends about how do you measure it but how's it how's it actually happen so we know that businesses like yourself understand that word of mouth is really powerful and drives more conversion than any message but the tracking of it and the measuring of it is is incredibly difficult and you know we have that exact challenge that was in our briefs that we used to get from clients we weren't able to do it yeah so what's happened as well is that when typically we thought we were going to be able to use social to do it so you know when we started some of us first facial page was like okay fantastic great we've got this group of people who are who love our brand of our advocates who we can nurture and engage and get all these insights to and really learn and and build and grow and what ended up happening of course is that we kind of muddy the water ourselves we use it as a lead channel we brought other people in we did like us to win apps and promotions which brought which I'm sure a lot of people have done before which brought all these different people in from different areas and to be honest they may not have had any intention ever of even using your business or being a customer so it became something which we all hoped was for advocates but then obviously Facebook has to make money they change their kind of algorithm it's become a pay-to-play station and it's very difficult now to be able to track or engage or understand that value so what ends up happening is the only way to know how to create advocates is around a customer experience okay so what about referral campaigns then yeah how does that play into all this because I know that I've worked in businesses before where there's a referral campaign and it's like okay if you refer this many people you get this as a gift or if you refer this many people you get this off your next bill or something like that what's aren't they advocates yeah yes and no so it is a different it is a different kind of marketing yeah so absolutely referral marketing exists and it's very widely common it's a widely practiced so as exactly as said refer this and receive what's really interesting though is the stats where the research has been done where you've asked they've gone out and asked people do you recommend a brand and the universe of the answer is yes so of all the people who say yes there are advocates they then ask okay why do you recommend the brand well what are those reasons why you recommended a brand and interestingly because I think it it's very different to what you do expect it's very different to referral marketing is that the customer experience so I know if I'm going to recommend a brand to a friend I really need to trust that that business is going to deliver a good experience for that friend and if I don't well I'm not gonna I'm not going to refer you so what we see is certainly the incentive side you're probably going to get a little bit of a spike but what we always say and best practice is always if you if you have to incentivize a referral it's a really short term tactic you are far better focusing on the customer experience and delivering a great customer experience to generate true advocacy because in the long term your business will be far more cost efficient for it you won't have to rely on incentives and interestingly when advocates are asked how incentives actually work for for them referrals only 1% said that's why they recommend so speaking to this graph now why do what are the other reasons that people recommend and what drives that so how can I how can I as an organization try and make this beneficial for me yeah so the customer experience is by far number one and what we've seen is a real shift in that space to so brands really and that's why they measure likely to recommend they look at okay how do we deliver a good enough customer experience to drive that advocacy and that's the real truth point you know it's not out it's not our messages it's not kind of trying to say things that maybe we don't deliver on it's it is only true when the advocate has that good experience and recommends to their friend it's a really good measure so the focus should be on being being human being empathetic really understanding your customers understanding what they want and delivering that for them and if you do make a mistake you know make up for it be human in that and apologize and and use that as a good service turnaround point the other reason why people recommend is is helping others so what was really interesting we did focus groups around why people use review sites compared to when they were to mouth in friends we said okay who's used a review site and everyone put up a hand usually a trip advisor and we said okay who's left a review every all the hands went down alright okay that's really interesting you know the value of the review site but you're not really participating yourself and we followed on and said okay who has actually went on and actually told their friends about the experience and all the hands went back up and said okay why is that I will I want to help my friends yeah there is an inherent need for us to want to help our friends you know we know that we live with them you know they they help us and that's the relationship we have so being able to ask the recommendations and that's what our platform kind of focuses on is the ability to store it for your friends to enjoy as well and then there's the social kudos as well that people get and I have a feeling that whilst this is measured as 3% it's probably a lot higher I think people like to feel they're knowledgeable people don't want to admit it exactly people like to go I knew about this business before you and are not great and this is but it's important you know it's a part of people's own brand persona that they feel you know I'm involved in tech so I know about all the tech businesses I'm gonna let you you know and you know how great am I and I think that's that's a big factor people have that social kudos and I think you know for me as well I only leave feedback when it's really really good or really really bad so as I've moved through my career in marketing I'm starting to look at you know annual customer satisfaction surveys and think well is that really a true representation because yeah if I've had three experiences with a company on an annual basis I'm going to look back to either really really bad experience or really really good experience it's not really timely is it so it's the fact that we're doing things much quicker and you know we need to know now and if I know if one of my friends asked for something on Facebook everyone's like bang bang bang straight away that also playing a role in what we're talking about yeah massively so what we see is the timing is everything and that's where brands are becoming a lot more sophisticated so instead of that annual survey that they send out and say try to remember that and exactly as you said you only remember the memorable one but you're gonna be really bad or really good and that in the in between you can't like oh I don't really remember so that's what kind of gets input but people are getting a lot more sophisticated with the CRMs the ability to actually target at that point there's a lot of literature written on this and I've consumed as much of it as possible and it basically says you know to to increase advocacy at its highest point you need to be timely it's essentially the point where the consumer would normally say thank you to you as a business so if you've just delivered an experience you've just delivered your service you've delivered it well that's where you should ask for that feedback and to ensure that it's going to be positive advocacy or even if it's not you know you get that immediate feedback to understand what you're doing wrong to then optimize rather than a year later when it's it's far too late and you've probably lost that customer and also while we're going through this I just like to hear feedback from people online right now just type into the chat box what sort of feedback loop or channels do you use within your organization and how is it working I know there might be a lot of charities and not for profits out there using Facebook because it is quite quite a good channel for them but you know do you do your annual satisfaction surveys do you do MPS or something like that as well just some feedback in the answer question box would be great before we move on so let's talk about warm yep word of mouth yes got it so word of mouth as I said it's you know it's a common theme across here that it's challenging it brands know that it's it's incredibly important as you said yourself you know it's your most powerful but there is a lack of tracking what we saw we used to do the customer and barometer the global customer brawner for MX each year and it would tell us that on average people tell eight people about a good positive experience and mostly offline and for friends but people are connected to on average 846 across all their social channels these days some duplication in that but you know the amount of contacts so we can't look at that as this bridge between okay well if there's this positive word of mouth going on people tell a but they're connected to 846 this is this is really big opportunity here for brands yeah but how do we how do we get that happening how do we track it how do we know when it's happened yeah that that seemed to be the missing piece for people I've just done that as well thanks for your comments that are coming through so Adam says their organization uses Facebook that's their main form of feedback at the moment however a lot of it is negative if it does come through on that channel but they do respond to it immediately which I've heard also always a good thing as well and then we've also got Natasha saying that they use satisfaction surveys that are just three little questions after each experience right after an experience with the organization yeah very different forms there yeah it's a lot of our clients to do the same and actually utilize both and what we're seeing through whether it's CSAT or customer satisfaction surveys or NPS hopefully you're tracking you know how likely they are to recommend because it's a really nice truth point of from a customer of really on your performance if you are and they're giving you a good a good score you know there's plenty not not just recognizing there's plenty of ways to actually drive that advocacy and in a positive form in social so you might use Facebook you might use social any other social channel to connect that positivity friends or review sites from a Facebook messaging yeah I don't think you're getting around that and I think that's you know one of the things that makes this accountable as marketers and shifting towards understanding well it's about the customer's voice not ours is they now have a voice since very loud on social it is often you know as you said you either go for the extremes positive and negative and that's probably why people are going to your Facebook to provide these negative comments we have you know we'll touch on it later but ours is a place we're focusing on the positive yep but certainly you know best practice is I'm glad to hear that you're applying to all of those as well and a lot of people here as well saying Amanda and Jarrods talking about I'm using Survey Monkey as the tool that actually goes out to people and actually create the survey you know in the days after the events or paper-based customer satisfaction surveys on the day of the event and I go to many conferences where before I hop on a seat after lifted up yeah and I'm much more inclined to fill it out then as well but at the same time I'm on Twitter and I'm on Facebook and it's like it's like an integrated approach now isn't it you can't escape it absolutely and you know it needs to be as I say we always talk about right time right person right message for to get that positivity but for all feedback of course you know you want to be timely you want to be there and then to get the most you know that's when you get those little nuggets of feedback that you wouldn't have got otherwise because your memory fades great and just on while we're still talking about the Facebook side of things from Lisa so she uses Facebook but gets a higher response rate from feel-good stories that aren't directly related to the organization rather than posts that are directly related to businesses or about their service so do you think that's still helpful in creating advocates the fact that you're bringing them in another way as opposed to look it's an interesting one I think people with Facebook it's changed people just need to be aware of what actually provides engagement we know you know we used to run a whole bunch of community social communities we know that the selling message never performs well no it is it is around creating those stories all those posts that people connect with what Facebook is now the algorithm and they make you know no hidden smoke mirrors around this it is around creating shared content so it's not about you actually don't get anywhere near as much traction if you create something that gets liked or commented on what Facebook's algorithm puts the priority to is where people share it because they've said well others others don't necessarily care about whether my friend is liking or posting on a brand's page what they do care about and what they put priority to is if you share it because you think it's so worthwhile content that you want your friends to know about it so that's when the content gets shared a lot higher so really before you post anything it's all around okay how shareable is this content is this what people are going to connect with and it's something which is polarized brands and you know we worked on for record Benchesa with one of the biggest advertisers globally and just before I left there they cut 70% of their social spent because they went well we want to deliver paid sales messages and this isn't necessarily the right channel for us so they really had to look at it and go what's the ROI yeah so just on that so we know how we can create advocates on our brand now we know when it's all about shareable content it's also all about you know giving people giving back to people and that sort of thing what sort of platforms and we let's talk about recamazing a little bit just so we can sort of distinguish between Facebook and recamazing and the other platforms available out there and put some context to what we're talking about yeah so what is it essentially yeah sure so recamazing is a fairly new approach in the sense of what our product provides but it's not a new approaches in marketing as we've all been talking about word mouth and how powerful it is so it's it's not a new sentiment but essentially the easiest way to explain it is we call us often ourselves the digital barbecue conversation so if we're if we're it's more an internal term if we are at a barbecue and you go I really need a good mortgage broker or I'm looking to get a physio or I'm looking to get involved in a charity want to know which one now I get it essentially you know you're you're seeing they're talking to friends and so you'll say you know it's anyone got a great mortgage broker I would go yeah sure Sarah go speak to mine they're awesome here's their details yeah so we essentially store where a shared location for friends to store all their favorite business recommendations so you can go at any point and see what your friends have recommended or you can ask your friend and it stores in one location against all the different categories so essentially you have your most trusted businesses in one place shared between your friends and that's how it works for users and obviously because that happens on our site yeah we got a lot of interesting data we get a lot of interesting metrics all those things we've talked about that are impossible to find about who's recommending us how does it happen when does it happen why are people recommending us all those things all of a sudden they're created and you can track them as a business to really understand well what is it that we're doing why are people out there recommending us what are they saying to friends when they're recommending us is it our online services our friendly staff is a specific staff member so at that point for businesses essentially we're really simple customer experience tool to help you with your advocate marketing okay we allow you to really simply ask for recommendations and track when they're given so TripAdvisor comes to mind I think of TripAdvisor a corporate TripAdvisor for businesses and understand that it's similar to that and if you could just explain the differences but why is it so positive I would think you know why can't people leave negative feedback how does that all play into it yeah sure so where we distinct ourselves because that's the most often the first question of how are you different to a review site so what we saw with review sites is that because it's not your friends you need that volume so you go on a review site and there might be 400 reviews but you don't know who those people are you know Bob from Sacramento you don't know him from a bar of soap when he says he's like this hotel you have to really dig in and see if that's something that resonates with you is this person like you do I actually yeah so but look it's incredibly effective and don't get me wrong you know I'm not saying it's a channel you shouldn't use it it is you know they've done studies on an extra star on Yelp equates to 9% increase in revenue for instance so incredibly important however what we've seen is the missing pieces is that friend and that that word of mouth recommendation between friends which the studies all tell us that it's far more effective if I can get I've got 400 views from randoms or I've got one good friend actually saying you should use this business I'm gonna go I'm gonna go at least consider that you know at least that's in my consideration set so very different as far as the normal need to look at volume compared to just one all I need one friend recommendation to shorten my consideration set the other thing that's different and you touched on before it's it's the positive yeah it's not the negative and the reason why we do that is because our whole mission is to mirror how word of mouth naturally happens already so that barbecue conversation we're talking about you say does anyone know a good mortgage breaker or what you see on Facebook where friends say and it happens almost every day on my feed hey can anyone recommend a good accountant a good whatever it might be they don't also say and can you tell me all the bad ones yeah because I need that you don't need that information because it's between friends and so if they just say no I trust this one do it great that's all I need that makes my whole journey a lot shorter so we are literally about storing those great businesses for friends so how do we get involved in this is it a page that people go to for businesses and just for people I'm so I'm guessing it's two separate yeah absolutely so as a user if I want to just go on and start storing my favorite businesses with friends you go to recamazing.com your login via Facebook you know we're not about creating a new social network there's plenty of others out there don't do that too many passwords exactly so you log in via Facebook we pull in all your friends in one place and you can start storing your favorite businesses you can invite your friends to join you can ask your friends to provide their favorite businesses in the categories you need if you need a record and so it all works very simply and hopefully it's quite intuitive please let me know if it's not and but from a business side you go to recamazing.com slash business or you'll see the prompt on there for business owners and essentially you register a profile really simple it's like a business card so it's just read back here's our here's our web address and here's how to get in contact that's all you need because it's the same as that barbecue conversation of here you go go speak read back and so it takes two minutes to register we're then not about creating content and ongoing content creation we know that's incredibly time-consuming and costly so you literally register your profile you then ask your own customers to recommend you to their social contacts ah so it's like a campaign then say hey guys we've got this um channel set up it'd be great if you can recommend us absolutely wow so you essentially it allows you to extract everything we've talked about of those advocates out there who are out there recommending you you you essentially ask them to recommend you and you ask them to say hey if you've had a great experience with us please let your friends know about us install that recommendation recamazing for your facebook friends to find when they need a good business okay so instead of it disappearing up the news feed and when you're asking for a recommendation it might post to facebook and disappear we store it permanently and recamazing and then we also have the ability to share it on facebook and twitter as well so you get the best so much sharing happening yeah exactly well you know sharing's caring but yeah the big difference for us is that it's permanently there so even a year later if you've gone and recommended a great designer or design agency I can go oh great I can go on here search design agency and see that you've recommended that fantastic I don't have to go out there and spend days looking for it I can put that in my consideration set and make my journey a lot quicker finding a good business so it's your goal and be mindful I'm very mindful the fact that you you started this business 18 months ago you said in your second bedroom so congratulations but is your goal eventually to have everyone have that everyone will have a recamazing profile yeah look that you know it's a very lofty goal maybe not everyone just 90 percent but yeah look our our goal and you know whilst this has been bubbling away for 18 months we launched to consumers in September so that's how long a platform like this takes to pull together we're really fortunate in that we've had you know category leading brands on board driving advocacy so we work with virgin we work the open colleges we work with Peter Warren automotive we work with a whole bunch of charity clients we receive funding in December from investment backing so it's a big milestone for us to actually you know drive even more value for our clients and for our users but our goal yeah absolutely right now the focus is on helping businesses grow and businesses who find word of mouth drives their business already and generally creating good customer experience they're the ones who are going to find the most value out of it and from a user perspective we know you know we know they're looking for recommendations we know at this moment the stats are 50% of all sales are influenced by word of mouth so we know it's happening we see it on Facebook all the time we're just providing a better solution for it to be stored so yes our goal is everyone to use it probably right now it's you know to get those people who are socially savvy the ones who really believe in advocacy and they're the brands that we've partnered with so how much does this cost if someone wants to hop online and do it now and I believe not for profits and charities there's a deal or yeah absolutely so look our big brand partners Light Virgin who you know have the agencies have the analytics kind of analysts looking at data and and understand their leads and advocates that's three grand a month in six month subscriptions but we do have a small medium-sized business profile which you don't get all the analytics and kind of forever but you do get access to some and you do get to drive recommendations still and that's 65 bucks per month and right now is actually a free trial but then as you said the the charities and if you're a registered charity and not for profit you actually get access to the platinum ones so the ones that they'll big brands use which is typically 36 grand a year it's free so there you go that's part of our giving back culture that we have it recognizing we kind of very proud of that yeah and so we don't want to make money off charities so if you're a charity go and utilize it because it's very valuable I just yeah I just was my I don't usually like bringing up anything sort of salesy in these events but I do know that we've got a lot of not for profits and charities online at the moment so I'm just wanted to make sure that you guys know that you do have access to these sorts of platforms for free and you know if you do have people wanting to use these platforms or even driving advocacy in general what are your recommendations because I'm thinking it's a lot more than just sending out a blast email saying I recommend us how do you do it how do you do it effectively yeah so it comes back to that that really mantra that we have around right person right time right message and we talked about before it sounds like some of watches are actually already doing customer satisfaction surveys so the web clients do it if they've given you a positive rating it's fantastic to hear you've had a great experience with us and you drop down the next question is please recommend us to your friends so they can find us when they're having looking for a good business so that's a perfect example of yep you've already established who your advocate is and then you ask the recommendation other clients you know open colleges look at it as okay you've just graduated from your online education and the teacher sends out