The Social Media Community: With Great Power...

Secondly, there’s no denying that social media has changed the way we communicate, interact and, in many cases, do business—and, as such, content like tweets and Facebook posts now carry as much weight as other, more traditional forms of communication.

 

 

There's a fascinating picture emerging about how social media is rejigging the rules of social engagement that hopefully everyone is paying attention to. 

 

There's no question that tools like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr allow more information to be shared by more people to larger audiences almost instantaneously; this is both a good thing and a bad thing.  It's good in the level of coordination and social solidarity it provides - look at how platforms like Ushahidi make disaster relief coordination between individuals, organizations and nations around the world that much more seamless.  Smartphone Aps like Guardly add an extra level of security to women walking university campuses at night.  Rapid response just keeps getting faster. 

 

Look also at the amazing level of coordination and pro-social behaviour that happened in response to the Boston Marathon - citizens were tweeting their love and support, letting others know if blood donations were needed at hospitals and where worried friends and families could turn to learn if anyone they knew who was in the race was injured.  The bombing was horrifying and tragic, but the response was the exact opposite of what terrorism is supposed to produce - a sense of community and comfort instead of heightened feelings of fear and vulnerability.

 

I'd also argue that social media is leveling out the playing field between the haves and have nots in a manner similar to the influence of unions a century ago.  Connect the dots between various e-campaigns over the past decade or so; former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty backed down on increased restrictions for young drivers in response to a Facebook campaign.  Similarly, #TellVicEverything stopped The Canadian Harper Government's Internet restrictions Bill dead in its tracks.  A robocall push-poll by Porter Airlines rapidly led to a sharing of information between people called on Twitter; within a day, the who and what behind those calls had been exposed online.

 

Then there's Anonymous; where the existing political or justice systems fail to fill their public mandate, there is now a powerful entity watching the watchers.

 

This is where the power of social media starts to slide into darker territory, though, and where the need for responsibility comes in to play.  @Vikileaks was done anonymously (though it didn't stay that way) and was really a mini-terror campaign directed against Vic Toews.  Cyberbullying is a terribly invasive form of individually-targeted terrorism (which is essentially what bullying has always been).  Hacking and information bleeding happens all the time; though most of us are more familiar with the "OMG - you should see this pic of U going around" variety, these privacy breaches can be much more damaging - and also point out a major weakness in the institutions we are supposed to trust with our personal information.

 

Which is where the hacking of AP's Twitter account and the circulated story about White House bombings and a wounded President come in.  One single tweet, coming from a reputable handle in an age of rapid-response and information dissemination briefly threw the market - the engine of the economy - into a nosedive.  that was just one tweet; picture a more coordinated attack that hacks the social media accounts of multiple respected agencies (media, government, banks, whatever). 

 

Picture the Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast spooling out over social media, except with the story a nuclear explosion over a major city.  It would go viral in seconds; timed and coordinated properly, the average citizen would be left with conflicting information and no way of knowing what or whom to trust.  Call it Invasion of the Social Media Snatchers.

 

It's for good reason that governments and organizations are seeking ways to clamp down on Internet security; the potential risks posed by hacking are stupendous and horrifying.  What's more - as would-be terrorists realize they can do the terror-infliction thing without putting themselves in harm's way, the use of hacking, information theft and misinformation campaigns are only going to increase. 

 

How can we say this with certainty?  As I've written elsewhere - as Western governments increasingly use advanced military weapons like drones to do their dirty work while keeping their hands clean, those on the receiving end are going to look for any and every way to respond in kind.  It's a historical trend - when you can't fight a super power head-on, you employ creative, guerrilla tactics.  The guerrilla war is increasingly online.

 

You can try to clamp down on e-terrorism all you want; as history teaches us, building more complicated locks simply results in smarter criminals.  This is not a battle that will be won through escalation - the only way to end the conflict is to look at the root causes behind what informs and facilitates e-terrorism and information manipulation.

When you have governments that withhold the facts from their citizens and only spool out pieces of partisan rhetoric, the playing field is wide open for misinformation; people already don't believe government is being open and honest, so they are that much more likely to believe alternate sources.  The way to combat this risk is for government to be more proactive, transparent and frankly, honest about what they're doing, what problems are arising and to proactively engage with citizens for solutions.  That way, people feel they are part of the government process and are less likely to be swayed by alternate misinformation; they will also feel more comfortable turning to official sources for verification before jumping on whatever meme is circulating on a given day.

 

The second piece is just plain good PR - instead of picking fights with specific enemies to reinforce relationships with established partners, governments, Political Parties and all organizations need to build stronger relationships with a more diverse range of players.  Altruism, after all, is selfishness that plans ahead; you're less likely to face a sneak attack from someone who you have supported or collaborated with in the past.

 

Social media might not create information, but it does disseminate it rapidly between massive audiences.  Not only can average citizens from anywhere on the planet compete with talking heads for attention; Established Voices can be co-opted through hacking to devastating public effect.

 

That's power money can't buy.

 

With great power, however, comes great responsibility.  That responsibility lies on the shoulders of every person with access to a computer, but unless they have positive role models (like government) encouraging responsible use of the medium, we will simply be looking at an online tragedy of the commons.

 

If that's not a reason to rethink partisanship, negative attacks and reactive policy, I don't know what is.

 

Selfishness That Plans Ahead

 

I'd say I feel bad for Ayn Rand, but were she still around that probably wouldn't be received as intended.

 

People are selfish creatures, just like our cousins - after all, altruism is simply selfishness that plans ahead.

 

Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

 

Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.

Last week on Slate, evolutionary anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson explored the question against the backdrop of two cultural events in 1957 — the consequences of the rogue, selfish activities of a pygmy hunter in a Congo forest, who used the group’s collective hunting efforts to benefit only himself, and in New York City, the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonist champions the author’s notion that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that each man “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”

Atlas Shrugged counts many politicians as admirers, perhaps most notably Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, who cites the book as one of his main inspirations for entering politics and is known to give Rand’s books frequently to his interns.

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So, does Rand’s theory comport with current evolutionary theory? The data is not exactly kind to her position. For example, Johnson describes an anthropologist’s account of the pygmy tribesman, Cephu, in the Congo who lived by the Randian ideal that selfishness is the highest morality. Cephu was part of the Mbuti tribe for whom “hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else,” Johnson writes, detailing how the tribe “employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap.”

It was a group effort, for most:

But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others.

Soon caught in this blatant attempt to steal meat, Cephu was brought in front of the whole tribe:

At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” [the anthropologist Colin] Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.

Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented.

He apologized, handed over his meat to the tribe and then, essentially, was sent to bed without dinner. As Johnson explains, selfishness is considered far from a virtue in such tribal groups, which still live in ways similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, every such group ever studied has been found to idealize altruism and punish selfishness, in everything from their mythologies to their mating practices.

(MORE: How Economic Inequality Is (Literally) Making Us Sick)

Although Rand accepted that early human life was a collective effort, she failed to realize how this shaped our brains. In most societies, for example, a man like Cephu would be seen as the opposite of a good catch for a woman wanting a partner. A good mate — and one whose genes were likely selected for and passed on in our earliest evolutionary history — would have been a cooperative hunter, one who didn’t put his own goals ahead of those of the tribe. He would have been altruistic in battle too, particularly when warring with other groups. A selfish soldier, after all, is known as a coward, not a hero.

The evidence for altruism as a critical part of human nature isn’t limited to anthropology. Studies of 18-month-old toddlers show that they will almost always try to help an adult who is visibly struggling with a task, without being asked to do so: if the adult is reaching for something, the toddler will try to hand it to them, or if they see an adult drop something accidentally, they will pick it up.

However, if the same adult forcefully throws something to the ground, toddlers won’t try to retrieve it: they understand that the action was deliberate and that the object is unwanted. These very young children will even assist (or refrain from helping) with a book-stacking task depending on what they perceive to be the adult’s intention. If the adult clumsily knocks the last book off the top of the stack, the toddler will try to put it back; if the adult deliberately takes the last book off, however, toddlers won’t intervene. Even before kids are taught to chip in — perhaps especially before they are told it’s an obligation — children are less selfish than often presumed.

Another study found that 3- to 5-year-olds tend to give a greater share of a reward (stickers, in this case) to a partner who has done more work on a task — again, without being asked — even if it means they get to keep less for themselves. And those cries of “That’s not fair!” that plague sibling relationships: they’re not only selfish; they reflect children’s apparently innate desire for equity.

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Fundamental tendencies toward altruism aren’t only seen in children, either. Worldwide, the aftermath of natural disasters are typically characterized by heroism and a sharing of resources — within the affected community and in others farther way — not selfish panics. During the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, there were no accounts of people being trampled rushing out of the World Trade Center towers; rather, those who needed assistance descending were cared for, and calm mainly prevailed. The same occurred after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011. The cases in which people stampede or look out only for themselves tend to be rare and involve very specific circumstances that mitigate against helpfulness.

Moreover, our stress systems themselves seem to be designed to connect us to others. They calm down when we are feeling close to people we care about — whether related to us or not — and spike during isolation and loneliness. Even short periods of solitary confinement can derange the mind and damage the body because of the stress they create. And having no social support can be as destructive to health as cigarette smoking.

Of course, none of this is to say that humans are never selfish or that we don’t have a grasping, greedy part of our nature. But to claim, as Rand does, that “altruistic morality” is a “disease” is to misrepresent reality.

(Share the love and read the rest of Johnson’s fascinating feature here.)

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What Amazon Can Teach Business, Politics, Education

Not just business - politics too often turns to its shareholders (sometimes the membership, but always the funders) as the only voice that matters.  The people are seen as consumers whose opinions can be shaped; there role is to consume politics and policy, not inform it.

 

It's a failed methodology.  Always has been.  Political organizers, business leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, any institution can learn something from this:

Late last week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos published his latest letter to shareholders.
This year's letter, like most of Bezos's letters, should inspire most companies to change the way they do business.
Specifically, it should inspire companies to do business the way Amazon does business — sacrificing this year's profits to invest in long-term customer loyalty and product opportunities that will create bigger profits next year and for years thereafter.
The way most companies do business is to focus primarily on today's bottom line: The prevailing ethos in corporate America, after all, is that companies exist to make money for their owners — and the more and the sooner the better — so every decision should be made in the context of that.
The result of this is that many (most?) companies scrimp on things like long-term investments, customer service, product quality, and employee compensation, in the interest of delivering a few more pennies to this quarter's bottom line.

FRED/Business Insider

American profit margins just hit an all-time high.

This obsession with short-term profits has helped produce the unhealthy and destabilizing situation that now afflicts the U.S. economy:

The profit margins of America's corporations are now higher than they ever have been in history, while the employee wages paid by America's corporations are the lowest they have ever been in history. Meanwhile, a smaller percentage of America's adults are working than at any time since the late 1970s.
Since the wages that America's corporations pay Americans become revenue for other American companies (most consumers spend pretty much every penny they earn), this fire-your-way-to-prosperity mentality is myopic short-term thinking at its worst.

Business Insider, St. Louis Fed

American wages just hit an all-time low.

So it's inspiring to see a striking example of success from a company that has never put short-term profits ahead of long-term investment and value creation.

Over the course of its spectacular 17-year history, Amazon has always put customers, and investing for the long-term, first.
Time and time again, for example, Amazon has voluntarily and proactively cut prices to increase its value to its customers. It has invested in technology and customer service practices that startle and delight customers and create long-term loyalty. It has made big, bold bets that had relatively low odds of paying off.
In so doing, Amazon has frequently and brazenly disappointed the short-term investors who tend to dominate Wall Street, investors who forever grumble that Amazon should be "making more money."
And, in so doing, Amazon has built one of the most dominant, enduring, and valuable enterprises that the Internet boom has yet produced.
Meanwhile many other promising companies that rode the Internet wave have stumbled, in part because they put too much emphasis on short-term profitability and failed to invest enough in long-term value creation. (Think AOL, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, and, most recently, Apple.)
America's obsession with short-term profitability has become so pervasive in our culture that even outside observers — journalists, for example — often snicker about Amazon's relatively low profit margins.
They should not be snickering.
They should be applauding.
And they should be encouraging other American corporations to follow Amazon's inspiring lead — to invest more of today's profits in tomorrow's opportunities, product development, customer loyalty, and dedicated employees.
Yes, if more corporations choose to do this, their stocks might temporarily drop.
But over the long haul, their stocks should do better than they would have done if the main mission of their enterprise remained to pile up more cash on the balance sheet. (See Apple's stock if you don't believe this.)
Bezos explains it this way:

Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. “Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” writes one outside observer.

But I don’t think so.

To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in.

More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.

"Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align."
That's the money quote. That's the philosophy that has made Amazon so successful. That's the philosophy that more American corporations need to embrace and understand.
Bezos's full letter is below.
(Note: An early reader of this letter, Peter Kafka of All Things D, pointed out that, much to my surprise, Bezos actually quotes an article I wrote that praised a small Amazon customer-service investment that benefitted me personally. I have linked the quote to the original article below. Jeff Bezos also recently invested in Business Insider, which was very exciting for us. Given this, if you want to dismiss this article as just mutual back-scratching, I understand. But I have made the same argument for years. And it is true regardless.)

To our shareowners:
As regular readers of this letter will know, our energy at Amazon comes from the desire to impress customers rather than the zeal to best competitors. We don’t take a view on which of these approaches is more likely to maximize business success. There are pros and cons to both and many examples of highly successful competitor-focused companies. We do work to pay attention to competitors and be inspired by them, but it is a fact that the customer-centric way is at this point a defining element of our culture.
One advantage – perhaps a somewhat subtle one – of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience – importantly – even in those areas where we are already the leader.
“Thank you. Every time I see that white paper on the front page of Amazon, I know that I’m about to get more for my money than I thought I would. I signed up for Prime for the shipping, yet now I get movies, and TV and books. You keep adding more, but not charging more. So thanks again for the additions.” We now have more than 15 million items in Prime, up 15x since we launched in 2005. Prime Instant Video selection tripled in just over a year to more than 38,000 movies and TV episodes. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library has also more than tripled to over 300,000 books, including an investment of millions of dollars to make the entire Harry Potter series available as part of that selection. We didn’t “have to” make these improvements in Prime. We did so proactively. A related investment – a major, multi-year one – is Fulfillment by Amazon. FBA gives third-party sellers the option of warehousing their inventory alongside ours in our fulfillment center network. It has been a game changer for our seller customers because their items become eligible for Prime benefits, which drives their sales, while at the same time benefitting consumers with additional Prime selection.
We build automated systems that look for occasions when we’ve provided a customer experience that isn’t up to our standards, and those systems then proactively refund customers. One industry observer recently received an automated email from us that said, “We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental on Amazon Video On Demand: Casablanca. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount: $2.99. We hope to see you again soon.” Surprised by the proactive refund, he ended up writing about the experience: “Amazon ‘noticed that I experienced poor video playback…’ And they decided to give me a refund because of that? Wow…Talk about putting customers first.” [Here's the original article.]
When you pre-order something from Amazon, we guarantee you the lowest price offered by us between your order time and the end of the day of the release date. “I just received notice of a $5 refund to my credit card for pre-order price protection. . . What a great way to do business! Thank you very much for your fair and honest dealings.” Most customers are too busy themselves to monitor the price of an item after they pre-order it, and our policy could be to require the customer to contact us and ask for the refund. Doing it proactively is more expensive for us, but it also surprises, delights, and earns trust.
We also have authors as customers. Amazon Publishing has just announced it will start paying authors their royalties monthly, sixty days in arrears. The industry standard is twice a year, and that has been the standard for a long time. Yet when we interview authors as customers, infrequent payment is a major dissatisfier. Imagine how you’d like it if you were paid twice a year. There isn’t competitive pressure to pay authors more than once every six months, but we’re proactively doing so. By the way – though the research was taxing, I struggled through and am happy to report that I recently saw many Kindles in use at a Florida beach. There are five generations of Kindle, and I believe I saw every generation in use except for the first. Our business approach is to sell premium hardware at roughly breakeven prices. We want to make money when people use our devices – not when people buy our devices. We think this aligns us better with customers. For example, we don’t need our customers to be on the upgrade treadmill. We can be very happy to see people still using four-year-old Kindles!
I can keep going – Kindle Fire’s FreeTime, our customer service Andon Cord, Amazon MP3’s AutoRip – but will finish up with a very clear example of internally driven motivation: Amazon Web Services. In 2012, AWS announced 159 new features and services. We’ve reduced AWS prices 27 times since launching 7 years ago, added enterprise service support enhancements, and created innovative tools to help customers be more efficient. AWS Trusted Advisor monitors customer configurations, compares them to known best practices, and then notifies customers where opportunities exist to improve performance, enhance security, or save money. Yes, we are actively telling customers they’re paying us more than they need to. In the last 90 days, customers have saved millions of dollars through Trusted Advisor, and the service is only getting started. All of this progress comes in the context of AWS being the widely recognized leader in its area – a situation where you might worry that external motivation could fail. On the other hand, internal motivation – the drive to get the customer to say “Wow” – keeps the pace of innovation fast.

---

Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. “Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” writes one outside observer. But I don’t think so. To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in. More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.
As I write this, our recent stock performance has been positive, but we constantly remind ourselves of an important point – as I frequently quote famed investor Benjamin Graham in our employee all-hands meetings – “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” We don’t celebrate a 10% increase in the stock price like we celebrate excellent customer experience. We aren’t 10% smarter when that happens and conversely aren’t 10% dumber when the stock goes the other way. We want to be weighed, and we’re always working to build a heavier company
As proud as I am of our progress and our inventions, I know that we will make mistakes along the way – some will be self-inflicted, some will be served up by smart and hard-working competitors. Our passion for pioneering will drive us to explore narrow passages, and, unavoidably, many will turn out to be blind alleys. But – with a bit of good fortune – there will also be a few that open up into broad avenues
I am incredibly lucky to be a part of this large team of outstanding missionaries who value our customers as much as I do and who demonstrate that every day with their hard work. As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1.

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Amazon.com, Inc.

April 2013

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.