Creativity tip #102: Be grateful

by claryc, posted in featured, Uncategorized

Having gratitude helps lower levels of stress and anxiety. According to the HeartMath Institute, “The greater your capacity for sincere appreciation, the deeper the connection to your heart, where intuition and unlimited inspiration and possibilities reside.”

Here are a few tips the Institute recommends for practicing gratitude:

Take a break and appreciate; try incorporating two or three breaks throughout the day to pause and appreciate something or someone. A two-minute break will do wonders for your stress levels.

Make a list. Check it all the time. Compile a list of things you appreciate, when you feel the physical signs of stress merely pull out the list and start appreciating. If you are paying attention, you may feel the stress relieving effects right away.

Breathe. If you are having a bad day and you are finding it hard to focus, just breathe. Taking deep, focused breaths and pay attention to your chest rising and falling. After a few, you will be ready to shift your attention away from the stressor and indulge in some gratitude.

Sources:

Creativity at work

Gretchen Miller 

HeartMath Institute

Creativity Tip #101: Keep doing.

by claryc, posted in Creativity
creative tip - how to be creative

Fear of failure and busy lives can stop creativity in its tracks. Research has shown that you are more likely to arrive at a creative solution or produce original work if you just keep working.

“Ideas and actions occur and interact as long as innovation is being pursued. Creativity continues as long as the action continues. This is not just desired it is necessary for as long as the innovation processes continue in a competitive environment in the absence of perfect knowledge about the outcomes of actions.” – Tudor Rickards, author and creativity researcher.

While creative inspiration often happens at what seems like random moments, creative work is focused work. So dive in and keep moving. You’ll be amazed at what happens.

 

Tudor Rickards (1996) The management of innovation: Recasting the role of creativity, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 5:1, 13-27, DOI: 10.1080/13594329608414835

The Dilemma of the
Digital Strategist

by claryc, posted in Communication, Creativity, Design, Strategy

Since 2001, I have been building devices designed to communicate using the Internet. I’m a digital strategist with a portfolio of websites and digital marketing campaigns.

I have grown curious about the effects of my work, and the work of others like me, on people around the world.

In an attempt to scratch this itch, I’ve been asking a lot of questions and digging around in the literature. The bumper sticker on my worn-out Honda CRV reads, “I’m not lost, I am exploring.” That concept is the lens I used as I explored the idea that the Internet has had and is having a profound influence on how we think, what we know, and how we relate to one another.

One concern I have centers around ethics, or the potential lack thereof, within the community of people working in digital strategy.

Corporations and large organizations now hold astounding amounts of data on all of us. With machine learning, algorithmic targeting, and carefully curated messaging, they are trying to deliver you messages that you will find engaging (Davis and Patterson, 2012).

Eric Schmitt explains how it works at Google in this interview on YouTube.

Here, Schmitt says that at Google, the idea “is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.” He talks about the “creepy line” but does not draw that line for us. How do we know where that line is? In many cases, companies are not clarifying their ethics regarding online communications. Instead, the line is a proprietary idea held and perhaps only partially understood within that organization.

Don’t get me wrong, I love googling just as much as the next person. My concern is about the ethics practiced by many organizations regarding data mining and targeting. The dilemma is becoming clear. Digital strategist are working to expand the Internet without defined ethical guidelines.

Perhaps a larger concern for me is with respect to my own ethical practices. This exploration has brought me to the realization that my ethics are based on practices of the past even as I help to build the communication machines of the future.

As a digital leader at my organization I have a responsibility to help establish and communicate our ethics and attitudes on this subject. Having a core understanding of how my decisions affect others will aid me in drawing a creepily line of my own.

I start by attempting to answer the following questions:

  • What is the effect of algorithmically delivered news?
  • What data do they have on us?
  • How do we know what to trust?
  • Who do we trust?
  • Where does the conversation around digital marketing ethics sit today?

This list is incomplete; there are so many more questions, but it would be impossible to list them all and try to answer them all. My journey is only beginning.

Now Read: What is the effect of algorithmically delivered news?

 

References:

Davis, K. & Patterson, D. (September 20, 2012). Ethics of Big Data. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Eric Schmitt discusses how algorithmic targeting works at Google (2011). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB-2n6KSYWk

 

Is there a conversation around ethics and
digital marketing happening today?

by claryc, posted in Communication, Strategy

A dialogue about ethics practices in the field of digital marketing, while not completely non existent, is limited and lacking in substance.

When the machines take over the world what part will marketers have played in the demise of of the human race? Unfortunately, we don’t know and won’t for a while.

In my opinion normalizing a conversation around ethical practices for the digital strategist should be an essential part of the conversations we are having regarding consumer targeting. I have no expectation that we will get it right, or save the human race, but it is worth a healthy conversation.

Notably, the topic is a complex one, but much of what I found easily available on the Internet appears to lacking in research and depth. Scholarly references, while not plentiful, were available for those with access to scholarly databases.

In the USA in 2013, full-year Internet advertising revenues totaled $42.78 billion, up 17 percent from the $36.57 billion reported in 2012 (IAB 2014). Search-related revenues accounted for 43 percent, display-related advertising for 30 percent and mobile, which grew by more than 140 percent between 2011 and 2013, reached 17 percent of the Internet advertising revenues (Nill, Aalberts, Li, & Schibrowsky, 2015).

The lack of dialogue focused on ethical practices in digital marketing compared to the amount of money being spent on digtial advertising appears unbalanced, to me at least. I found quite a few discussions centered on the pros and cons of machine learning and the use of big data, but to little regarding the use in the marketing space.

I believe we are only beginning to understanding the effects of our focused, personalized targeting efforts.

Consider this, “the recent advances in the use and potential abuse of ‘big data’ is one of the most pressing issues facing both marketers and public policy decision makers,” according to Alexander Nill, Robert Aalberts, Herman Li and John Schibrowsky -contributors to the Handbook of Ethics and Marketing. The team of researchers are in support of “more ethics-based research” focused on data privacy and consumer targeting (2015).

While [Online Behavioral Advertising] potentially provides advantages to online
consumers such as ‘free’ access to online sites – the advertising revenues
pay for keeping the sites free of charge – the practice has the technological
potential to violate consumers’ privacy to a hitherto unmatched extent.
OBA is poorly understood by most consumers, often non-transparent
And sometimes outright deceptive. Since the practice is relatively new, laws and
regulations are still evolving (Nill, Aalberts, Li, & Schibrowsky, 2015).

Evil much like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Ethical decision making works in a similar fashion, each person makes decisions based on the experiences and biases they bring to the table (2015). Statements like “don’t be evil” (Google, 2014), just won’t cut it and do not clearly define the ethical stand of the company.

What I am not advocating for is the erection of regulations that stifle creativity or risk innovation, but I do think it is time for a real discussion about the ethics of profiling and targeting consumers.

References
Google. (2014). U.S. Public Policy. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html

Nill, A., Aalberts, R. J., Li, H., Schibrowsky, J. (June 26, 2015). ew telecommunication technologies, big data and online behavioral advertising: do we need an ethical analysis? Handbook on Ethics and Marketing. Retrieved from https://www-elgaronline-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/9781781003428.00025.xml

Who and what do we trust?

by claryc, posted in Communication, Design, Strategy

We as a society are still placing trust in large brands and big names. Maybe that trust is wavering or changing a bit, but in a society where alternative facts and echo chambers are real, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize authority and know what to trust.

When I googled the phrase “what makes an authority,” I didn’t receive the results I had hoped for. Instead of handily presenting me with a psychological paper, my search returned a list of resources designed to teach me how to become an authority myself.

The Launch Coach wants to help me become an authority, not simply an expert. The Goins Writer can help me get 100K readers in 18 months, and the Authority Blog Starter Kit shows what an Authority website really is.

Before I conducted this search, I thought we had to earn authority. From this results list, it looks as if we can purchase it at a reasonable rate. To understand the difficulty in knowing exactly who to trust, or consider an expert, think about how many people out there are calling themselves experts. “In 1970, there were about two dozen think tanks. Today, there are over 3,500 worldwide” (Weinberg, 2011).

To dig into this idea, I ran a few studies through Amazon Mechanical Turk—a service that allows anyone access to a massive number of users at a low cost. I ran two tests. In the first test, I surveyed 200 people, asking them to select the tweet that was most likely true.

The tweets that appeared to garner the most trust were a posting by NBC about celebrities raising money for semolina victims (31 percent) and a tweet from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s head of athletics with recent stats from a game (27 percent). Coming in a close third was a posting by Business Insider Magazine about Ikea’s effort to build shelters for homeless people that can be assembled quickly (21 percent).

The final two tweets identified as trustworthy were retweets by people who carried no brand recognition. One claimed a black man had been killed by white supremacists in New York City (11 percent); the other accused Congressman Devin Nunes of protecting President Trump (10 percent).

I also asked survey participants why they chose as they did.

Here are some of my favorite responses from my survey: “Don’t think anyone would make it up;” “This tweet has most number of hearts and retweets;” “Nunes is corrupt;” “Because it is from a reputed news channel with blue tick, which means it is authentic;” “It is from a reputable Twitter account and the story is non-clickbaitey;” “Ikea often does things like this, it is totally believable. As it is the one most easily proven, I chose it over the others;” “It seems factual enough and people don’t usually lie over scores.”

In the second test, I asked Amazon Turk workers to review a website and tell me which sites of the ones presented were most likely to be reputable and which were least likely to be reputable. I had 50 responders to this test.

The five sites selected for this test originated from a Google search for the phrase “raising children” and are presented in the table below.

Website % who selected not reliable % who selected reliable
Raising Special Kids 14% 14%
Wikihow 35% 41%
Washington Post 19% 21%
American Psychological Association 14% 12%
Up Worthy 18% 12%

A few reasons users gave for identifying a website as disreputable:

  • Raising Special Kids: “The site design looks cheap and dated (I’m on a desktop). There’s not really any helpful information on the front page. It looks like I’m going to have to click around to find out what sort of site it is.”
  • Wikihow: “I think the article is good. But I am not sure if the person who wrote the article is trustworthy.”
  • Washington Post: “Too long.”
  • American Psychological Association: “Pretty disorganized format with poor choice of fonts and bad front-end code upon checking the page’s development features.”
  • UpWorthy: “It’s a site known for click-bait and low quality content”

Reasons participants offered for identifying a website as a reputable source:

  • Raising Special Kids: “The website looks legit and is followed by .org.”
  • Wikihow: “It seems to incorporate the most different sources, rather than just relying on one person’s point of view.”
  • Washington Post: “It is a news article and has a Harvard psychologist offering tips.”
  • American Psychological Association: “APA is a trusted source.”
  • UpWorthy: “It seems relevant to what I am looking for but also interesting to read.”

From my anecdotal surveys, I can begin to make a couple of assumptions.

First, we still have trust in branded organizations. In many instances, survey participants indicated that they made their selections based on brand recognition.

Second, our personal experiences greatly affect what we find believable. In the end, it appears our confirmation biases—a tendency for look for information that confirms previously held ideas—heavily influence our judgments about what is true and who or what we should believe.

Third, design plays an important role in how we decide if information is true.

Next Read: Is There a Conversation Around Ethics and Digital Marketing Happening Today? 

References:  

Weinberger, D. (2012). Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Not That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everwhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. Basic Books. New York.