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So, this is the point.
I am very curious about one thing, being a Psychology student
and knowing that you have a PhD in Social Psychology
if I'm not wrong.
So how did your PhD in Social Psychology influence the course of your research in business?
I'd say that's a good question.
My PhD in Social Psychology looked at
a phenomenon called "social contagion",
how ideas and behaviors spread through social networks,
and this is more traditional social networks rather than necessarily online social networks
and particularly looked about how suicidal behavior spreads through social networks,
so knowing somebody who's suicidal or hearing about somebody who has attempted suicide,
how that can impact on the propension to commit suicide.
So I looked at the language around suicide and words that are cues,
that can actually, when you hear certain positive cues,
that actually cue the thoughts of suicide,
justify the idea of suicide,
and give it rationale for doing it.
So through my PhD I put together some recommendations for how to communicate,
how the media should communicate suicide to make it less contagious,
because what we know is that whenever there's a big, front page media story
about some celebrity committing suicide,
then suicide rates jump by about 10% in the 2 weeks following,
so there is this copycat contagion effect.
So my research was looking about
what sort of guidelines can we give media
to stop that contagious spread of ideas and behavior.
Now, from a business perspective, what you want to do is
rather than stop contagious ideas spreading,
you want to create contagious ideas.
Whether they be advertising ideas,
whether they be product ideas
And you want to drive the adoption of your product
through a process of contagion, through imitation, through social networks.
And so basically my business work is simply reverse engineering
the work that I've done on suicide.
Rather than trying to make an idea less contagious,
how can you make it more contagious?
How can you facilitate the spread through social networks?
In doing that, I actually put together a little tool,
a web based market research tool that basically plays an association game:
so if I say "Intervistato", what comes to mind around "Intervistato"?
What are the words you associate with it?
And then you collect those associations on the Internet,
so the more associations that people have,
you create a tag cloud of top associations,
and then you can use those to embed in your communications
especially the positive associations, positive words
and to make connections
and that actually helps an idea become more contagious.
And if you want to stop "Intervistato" from being contagious,
you actually start using negative words and you don't use the positive words.
That's very interesting, but how can you justify it scientifically?
Is there any kind of study or research being done during these months, years
about this?
Yeah, it's a huge amount. I mean, my research to start with,
but there's a whole body of research around this idea of social contagion,
looking at the spread of ideas and behaviors through social networks,
and there's a lot of experiments and studies that show that
once you're exposed to particular ideas you're more likely to adopt them
and pass them on under certain circumstances.
My research looked at field experiments, did a field experiment for example
looking at Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana singer who committed suicide
and whether the exposure to his suicide note,
that actually is available online,
whether that actually primed people's mind to make them think
those people seeing it, whether they themselves
would be more likely or less likely to entertain the idea of suicide themselves.
So there are formal scientific studies showing that this social contagion,
this spread of ideas and behaviors through social networks does indeed happen,
and the tools we can use to actually facilitate it, accelerate it or
if we want to stop it, stop it.
Excellent. So, you started with this kind of research on suicide,
and I think that's one thing you did for the Ministry of Defense,
if I'm not wrong.
Yeah, we published and we worked with a number of organizations
looking at how to take it a little bit further, because suicide is related to suicide terrorism,
and we took the research they did with colleague Sharon Attia,
we actually wrote an article saying that the way the media was treating
suicide terrorism, in a sensationalistic fashion in using the media,
it's likely that copycat suicide attacks would occur,
and I was based in London at the time when we wrote this article in the Psychologist
saying the way that suicide terrorism is going to be communicated
is likely to create a contagion effect, is likely to create a copycat incident.
And on the 7th there was the terrorist attack in London, just after we published the article
and so we started talking with authorities about how it's possible,
the potential for actually moderating how you communicate terrorist attacks
in the media to make it less likely that copycat attacks would follow.
Ok, so how did this kind of research actually, really bring you to talk about business?
What brought you to do that, really?
I think it's simply a matter of, well
I spent 4 years of my life working about how to make ideas less contagious
and in doing that you have to understand what makes them contagious
and so the idea behind that was, well
there is money to be made, actually working with companies who want to make
ideas more contagious and so I launched an online market research company
called BrainJuicer with partner John Kearon, which is now a
relatively large market research company
that actually helps advertisers to understand these association maps
these mental association maps,
what are the key positive and negative associations around a brand or a concept and how they can actually use it, use this map to
prime the minds of consumers to trigger positive associations,
which then positive associations will make,
create choice associations in their mind,
which then will lead to purchase.
So, the short answer to your question: because the business world has a need
for understanding what makes ideas contagious and my research helped that.
So, can you tell me where we are, what's the state of the art about social commerce, at the moment?
Well, social commerce is slightly different to where my background looked
at the spread of ideas through social networks.
Now, if you want to look at the spread of a product through social networks,
one key part of that is buying the product.
So, if ideas, behaviors, spread through a process of diffusion through
social networks, then it just seems obvious that you should allow people
within social networks, specifically online social networking platforms
to actually purchase products, because that's the way the products spread.
I mean, advertisers like to think "Hey, we're going to do a big ad campaign"
But, pretty much all we know about how products diffuse is
they diffuse through a process of word of mouth and imitation through social networks.
So it's a logical evolution of commerce to allow people
not only to spread ideas through social networks,
but allow people to buy products in social networks.
We had this big evolution in social media, called social commerce
which is simply the fusion of social media and e-commerce.
So effectively allowing people to buy in social networks or
allowing people to connect where they buy on websites.
So you've seen probably the Facebook Connect, all these Facebook Connect and Like buttons,
that allow people to connect with each other where they buy.
And that allows them to make smarter shopping decisions,
and it also allows retailers and brands to sell more because
people tend to listen to each other more than they do to ads.
So, you asked me what's the state of the art.
I think what we're seeing is two things evolving in social commerce,
two big areas: one is so called f-commerce, Facebook commerce,
where allowing you to put stores in social networking sites, such as Facebook,
so people on a tab or in the news feed can actually buy directly
within the social network, without having to go to another e-commerce site.
So for example Warner Brothers and Paramount allow people to either buy movie tickets
or get a live streaming from a Facebook page and pay for it.
On the other side of the Facebook commerce area, or f-commerce area,
is actually connecting up e-commerce websites to Facebook,
so people can basically shop with their social graph:
you can shop with your friends, you can like stuff, you can send stuff,
you can have a conversation with your friends via Facebook on a website.
So that's one area, the whole F-commerce area, it's really taken off
and Mark Zuckerberg says, you know, if he had to guess,
the next big thing in the digital world is social commerce.
And, of course, he's at the epicentre of it, 1/10 humans now are on Facebook,
so it's just the biggest place to sell stuff, and to market stuff.
So, you've got that area, and then in the other area you've got
this whole group buy area, so all these sites that allow consumers
to come together and collectively use their collective power,
to actually negotiate and get better deals on prices,
we've seen the rise of Groupon and Living Social and hundreds,
literally hundres of other platforms that allow consumers to come together,
and get really great, great prices.
So it's allowing people to connect online, and just through the sheer number
say "Ok, now we'll buy 100 of these, but we want a price that is significantly less"
You're getting middlemen, brokers, such as Groupon that are facilitating
this process of consumer power.
Ok, so, they're definitely taking off. Social commerce, f-commerce, m-commerce as well
they're all taking off, but it seems like they have a very small,
they represent a small part of the market actually.
Do you think that the technique, the state at which they are now
is the final one, or there's going to be some more evolution?
And how...
It's always evolving, I mean if you would've asked 15 years ago
whether e-commerce would have taken off, people would have said
No, it's a completely mad idea, people want to go to stores,
and things just evolve.
The technology's evolving so fast, and I think you mentioned m-commerce,
I think m-commerce has no social aspect, particularly towards mobile commerce
at the moment.
But what we're seeing is this huge trend of everything coming together into
the palm of consumers' hands, either through tablets or through handsets
and so I think mobile commerce will take over, so I think what we will start
to see is this new technologies that - the convergence between social
that allows shoppers to make smarter decisions by asking their friends, getting feedback,
looking at reviews.
Mobile that allows them to actually - for that social intelligence that
they've got to be mobile and available and also allow them to
purchase and buy.
It becomes almost their mobile brain,
and related to that, location based services, because your mobile
through GPS knows exactly where you are, and because of that
you can actually get contextually relevant content where you are, when you are.
So I think through these 3 things we're just seeing the beginning
of how this is beginning to come together. So, the short answer is
social commerce is very new, it's got very low penetration,
people are still not shopping with their social graph,
still shopping on social networks is - seemed quite mad to most people,
it's very, very new, but I think it's going to become more and more mainstream,
at least - maybe not Facebook commerce or group-buy as we know it,
but this idea of actually allowing people to shop with their social intelligence,
to be smart consumers using social technology,
mobile technology and location based technology.