Here then was the chance to discard some old ideas about the web of destinations and sign posts, the MobCon and of course the power of FLINK! and replace them with the new ideas about how the SoMe conversation has changed the world.
After 15 months of typing what I have (re)discovered, almost by accident, is nothing less than “the shock of the old”.
I was taking another look the ideas scattered across Gabriela Badica’s blog and I thought to myself I have seen this before. Then I remembered Sam Brodie’s Design Blog, Bradd Libby’s Blog and then Tomi T Ahonen’s Blog. And then I thought of all the other Blogs I had discovered over the past 15 months and I thought of what I am doing with excapite. And then it hit me, as they say, “like a bus in the street”. We are all busy building Knowledge Nests.
These blogs are places where people have expended time and energy gathering disparate materials to create a personal knowledge nest online.
Some are a collection of industry insights or experiences, a collection of “this is what I know”, while others like Gabriela’s are best described as a celebration of life.
Excited by this insight - particularly given the amount of energy that has been expended to get here – I went back an reanalysed the data I had collected from the blog traffic stats and I (re)discovered 3 key patterns in the data.
- Firstly people are creatures of habit they tend to return to trusted sources and so there is inertia in their tendency to explore.
- When they do explore they tend not to travel far from their original destination. By that I mean people rarely travel more than one of the six degrees of separation from their point of embarkation which in most cases is the search engine.
- Finally those that do explore are general out in search of content (i.e. Knowledge) to take back home. I know this because over 75% of all excapite’s search impressions are for images, not words. Hence the idea of the web as a network of Knowledge Nests.
At the moment the most visible expression of this activity is of course blogging in all its formats. Be it WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Slideshare or YouTube.
Most people would call it Social Media [SoMe]. Knowledge – perhaps even the term Experience – Nesting is a better description because it not only includes words and pictures but also relationships.
Of course Knowledge Nesting is not a new idea. In fact it is very retro. It is what the original web geeks did when they created personal web pages full of hyper-links to their favorite content and the web pages of their friends. If you take a 1995 personal web page and give it a 2010 GUI make over you have Facebook. The hyper-links are replaced by real-time feeds. After all, why travel in search of entertainment and new experiences when you can stay at home and watch Hyper-TV?
Knowledge nesting was initially understood as simply the curation of links to disconnected ideas scattered across the web (Think Denis Dutton, Arts and Letters Daily and the Age of Heroes). Today its undertaken on a far more personal level. Be it your Facebook page, Twitter account or your Blog the activity you are pursuing is one of Nesting. The gathering together in one place all the things you have found across the net and now increasingly in the real world in one place into a hyper content scrapbook of ideas, people, places and media content.
Nesting is of course one of the most fundamental of human activities. So how does this help us to understand the web? Where are the opportunities in this insight?
First thing is to think beyond the idea of your customers building Knowledge Nests and to think in terms of your customers being engaged in the activity of building Digital Nests.
At the moment the two most high-profile, and arguably the most popular (at least in the USA) digital nests are Facebook and the iPhone.
The people scattered across the web on Facebook, WordPress, Twitter – your customers – are busy building Digital nests.
The owners of iPhones, iPods and iPads are busy building digital nests.
The owners of PCs, Laptops and Netbooks are busy building digital nests.
The owners of TV, DVD players, Cable TV, Playstations, xBox’s and Wii’s are busy building digital nests in their lounge, family and bedrooms.
The commercial objective is to be invited, or better still gathered, by the customer for inclusion within the nest.
For advertisers this means you don’t have to be in the conversation, you don’t even need to be on the menu, but you do need to be included in the nest.
Understand this simple idea and you can see why simply “putting ads on the menu” no longer works. What your customers are looking for are things to take back to their nest.
You don’t need to interrupt. In fact if you do then chances are you’ll be thrown out of the nest. You need to be interesting enough to be acquired (by fair means or foul) and brought back to the nest. If you can achieve this then you have achieved your commercial objective. By that I mean you are loved so much you become part of the nest.
This then is our digital economy today: A mix of nesting places and nesting materials.
Today we are busy building destinations that hopefully attract mega amounts of traffic but what if this whole approach is fundamentally wrong? What if rather than building sites that attract mega traffic we should be simply creating “collectibles for the nest”. What if the real measure of success isn’t “Have they arrived?”, ”Did they stay?” and “Did they leave their mark?” (e.g. Twitter, Likes or Comments) but “Have they taken us back to their nest”?
The activity of building digital nests also suggests that optimising your web sites performance through the much publicized techniques of SEO And SMO is probably the wrong way of thinking about how you make your self attractive to others on the web.
When optimizing your site to attract nest builders you are probably better off investing in software algorithms that map events in Nature. Here I am thinking about algorithms that replicate feeding patterns, flocking, nest-building and of course discovering a new mate.
Again this idea takes us back to 1995 and the story of how Cemex revolutionized their cement delivery business by apply complex adaptive theory to the problem of delivering wet cement to building sites. Clearly a successful solution to the nest-building problem in the real world.
The big question moving forward is will people keep their knowledge nest(s) close at hand on their smart phone or will they continue to publish them so the rest of the world can share the experience? Will today’s global fascination with building “Destination Me” be a transitory “teenager” phase in the evolution of the web or is it here to stay?
I say that because historically we have monetize our web sites by “being here” and yet we monetize our mobile apps by “being there”. The web sites are built to attract traffic – nest builders – while the mobile apps are taken back to the nest (e.g. The iPhone). We don’t measure the success of apps by stickiness because that metric is irrelevant. We measure them by the number of downloads to the nest. So while Facebook and MySpace is a place where nests are built for free Apple’s App Store is a place where nesting materials are purchased and then taken back to the nest.
So far it has proven more profitable to deliver a private nesting experience rather than a public nesting experience. One could compare the digital nesting activities of Facebook, Twitter and WordPress users vs. iPhone owners with the “real world” nesting activity of Public Housing vs. Private Home Ownership.
The nesting concept is also interesting in that it may help us to understand why there is a such lack of permanence in the public nesting spaces. The nests built in the Free Nesting Placing (i.e. The defunct, faded or fading Social Networks) appear to be so precious for such a short space of time and then whole communities move on to the next free nesting space. The digital nesting experience appears to be cyclical, if not seasonal. Why is this?
Does this also explain the fashion of upgrading your phone every 2 to 3 years? Does it also explain why the bulk of the digital nesting activity is undertaken by people of, dare I say, optimum reproductive age?
Anyway, at least for now, these are my thoughts and impressions on what I have discovered so far.
GB
January 31, 2011
I’m honoured to be a very-very-very little part of Excapite’s readers.