Video Games And Influence

from the depends-on-who-you-talk-to dept

In our recent post about some old rockers complaining about music video games being no substitute for actually playing instruments (not that anyone claimed it was), one of our commenters, Comboman, made a rather amusing point concerning complaints against video games:

Video game critics claim violent games will make kids want to imitate the game and do real violent acts. Now they're complaining that music games will make kids NOT want to imitate the game and do real music?

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Gullible Consumers Easily Swayed By Meaningless Tech Specs

from the oooooh,-1.21-jigawatts!! dept

I imagine this won't come as a huge surprise to many of you, but it appears that we're all influenced by the presence of tech specs on a product -- even if those specs are somewhat meaningless. A variety of separate studies showed that people would usually purchase the product with "more" specs, even if they were meaningless. One of the tests even had people create their own tech specs based on their usage, and they were still more influenced by the specs than the actual usage. Apparently, we need to get busy adding more "tech specs" to our products around here...

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Howard Stern Learns: Going Behind A Paywall Is A Good Way To Lose Influence

from the the-price-of-influence dept

We've talked for years about the danger any media makes in focusing on setting up a paywall. In an age where openness and the ability to get others to spread and promote the content for you is often a key barometer of success, locking yourself up behind a paywall takes you out of the wider conversation, and by its very nature, decreases your overall ability to influence. The LA Times has an article noticing that this seems to be exactly what's happened with Howard Stern, who famously made the jump from terrestrial radio to satellite radio -- and in doing so, appears to have lost a large percentage of his audience, and with it much of his influence. Of course, he was paid handsomely for doing so, but Sirius almost certainly expected Stern to bring a larger percentage of his audience with him. Yet, as the article notes, Stern's waning influence due to the switch means that even he's having trouble getting the level of celebrity that he used to command to even bother coming on his show. Amusingly, the article also notes that the very reason why Stern claimed he was moving to satellite -- his troubles with the FCC -- may be contributing to his lack of influence with the new show. In the past, every time Stern got in trouble with the FCC, it boosted ratings, giving him plenty of free publicity. Without that foil, he loses much of the free publicity. Such is life behind the paywall, apparently.

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Remember All Those 'Influence' Ad Companies? They May Have A Patent Problem

from the ah-google dept

It was just a couple weeks ago that we (skeptically) noted that there were a bunch of companies trying to create systems to use things like a "FriendRank" to use "influence" to help advertise. However, it looks like those companies may have to deal with a bit of a patent block. Slashdot points out that Google has applied for a patent on just such a process to establish a sort of "FriendRank." Of course, the fact that there are a bunch of companies all trying to do this (prior to this patent application being published) certainly suggests that this is hardly the sort of breakthrough that requires a patent (though, it seems likely that those other companies are also applying for patents, meaning we may soon have yet another patent thicket).

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New Push Towards Social Advertising May Miss The Fact That Influence Isn't Static

from the check-yer-assumptions dept

As more and more people are realizing that banner ads don't work very well as advertising, there's a rush on to find better alternatives. What's now getting a lot of attention is "influential" ads. News.com has two examples of new companies trying to put this into action. The first is a company called 33Across that tries to use some algorithm to figure out who is most "influential" online and target ads towards them, hoping they'll influence others. The other is a company with the most generic name for this space: SocialMedia, who is hyping up the fact that it's come up with a "FriendRank" to determine how influential someone is, and then try to get those influential people to effectively "endorse" advertisements that their friends see.

These approaches have plenty of problems, but the biggest one is the simple fact that studies are starting to show that the concept of "influentials" is overstated. Sure, people are influenced by others, but it's not because some officially designated "influential" influences them. Influence doesn't work that way. People don't trust people because they're suddenly considered influential. They trust people because they know that individual well and trust them on that particular topic. In other words, Bill could be influential on a certain topic to Jill, but won't be influential to others or on other subjects.

But, these services don't seem to do much to recognize that. Instead, they assume that people actually have some sort of universal "influential" rank. What they'll quickly discover is that this won't be very effective, because people won't be influenced by who these services think are influential. And, if anything, these efforts will decrease influence by inserting additional friction. If I were to see a friend in an ad for a product, before making me think that product is more interesting, it will make me wonder what my friend gets out of it, and whether or not he really believes in the product. I trust recommendations that come up unsolicited -- not those that are built into an ad unit.

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Would You Believe People Trust Their Real Friends Over Bloggers?

from the oh-my! dept

In what may be one of the most pointless studies done in quite some time, a research firm has discovered to its own amazement that people tend to trust their own friends more than well known bloggers. Well, I should certainly hope so. Were there really people out there who thought that folks with high trafficked blogs actually held more sway than a personal friend? This is really nothing more than a retread of a (much more academic) report back in January noting that so-called "influentials" don't really have very much influence. What that study found was that "word of mouth" works, but where those recommendations come from tend to be somewhat random. So things bubble up from everywhere, rather than starting with well-known bloggers. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, but after a few years of ridiculous media coverage suggesting that top bloggers have influence, it's nice to see a few reminders that influence is a much more democratic system.

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