Discussion: How Social Processes Become Advertising Tools viaTechnology Mediation

Now that we understand the processes which the social oracles in YNM are based on, the final issue we explore is how these rather mundane social activities of gossiping and having a friend ' ask for you' - processes that in their most basic offline form have nothing to do with advertising - can nonetheless be adapted into effective advertising mechanisms by having technology mediate their performance. There are at least four interrelated reasons why certain social processes when combined with online technology can be transformed into effective advertisements.

Reason 1: Social processes create a demand for multiple information channels to distribute social assets

Individuals engaged in social processes like the ones described in the analysis, produce social assets: information about friends , family members , or other associates that those same people may find useful or interesting. The producers of the social assets naturally want to share them with their acquaintances . In information systems terms, there is a need or demand for information channels that allow one person to distribute content to many other people. Interestingly, the map of the channels created by a user spreading an asset via the social oracles (Figure 1-6 and Figure 1-16) is similar to the information channels needed by a business to spread advertisements to customers.

To see this, note that one of the key functions of advertising is to 'create' customers (Capon, 1994) to visit a business and purchase its goods. Figure 1-21 (left diagram) depicts this function using information activity maps. A business (B) sends an advertisement (1. advertisement) to one or more consumers (C _i ), in the hope that they will become customers and purchase (2. $) the business's goods (3. goods). The typical business does not have direct access to consumers and must pay television, radio, print, and other mass-media organizations (O) to distribute the advertisement (Figure 1-21, right figure).

Figure 1-21: Information activity maps for conventional advertising

Since the map of the channels a user creates to spread a social asset to multiple acquaintances via social oracles is similar to that needed by a business to advertise to multiple customers, the former may be leveraged for advertising purposes. A benefit of using the channels in this manner is that users freely construct them. Thus, if a business can co-opt these channels to deliver advertisements, a virtually no-cost advertising mechanism would result. However, first the user must create the channels, and then some means of automating the transformation of social assets into advertisements must be found.

Reason 2: Online technologies allow a user to easily create the channels needed to immediately distribute social assets to multiple individuals

Social processes create a demand for information channels to distribute the resulting social assets. When these social processes are performed online, users can take advantage of numerous vehicles, like e-mail and instant messaging, to immediately send assets to other people, viz., online technologies allow users to easily construct channels for immediately distributing social assets to multiple individuals. More precisely, the Internet provides the channel for distributing the social asset, and technologies like e- mail and instant messaging provide different vehicles for delivering the asset. Contrast this with social assets constructed offline, such as gossip generated by two people. When people construct a social asset offline, they must wait until they meet up with other friends or are in a situation near a phone, or other communications device, before they can spread the asset.

Custom interfaces to vehicles can be placed near the social asset to further entice a user to send the asset to multiple acquaintances. For example, the Compatibility Game places a custom e-mail form both before and after compatibility reports, to encourage users to send the reports to their friends (Figure 1-22, middle of picture).

Figure 1-22: Simple form for e-mailing the 'gossip' (center of screen)

Having an asset (message) and a means of distributing the asset (medium or channel) are necessary conditions for any advertising mechanism. However, to complete the mechanism, the asset must be transformed into an advertisement that lures the recipient into visiting the business and becoming a potential customer.

Reason 3: Having online technologies mediate the distribution of a social asset allows the automatic transformation of the asset into a direct-response advertisement

Given a social asset and distribution channels for that asset, the final step is to spread it in such a way that it lures users into visiting the Web site - to transform the social asset into an advertisement. Direct response advertisements provide a framework for understanding how to perform this transformation. A direct response advertisement is an advertisement that 'seeks a direct response - an order or an inquiry - from the consumer' (Ogilvy, 1985; p. 148). Direct response advertisements consist of a headline, body copy, and a coupon (Figure 1-23).

Figure 1-23: Key elements of a direct-response advertisement

To uncover the details of transforming a social asset into an advertisement, we will examine the e- mails sent out by YNM's social oracles in the context of direct-response advertisements. As we shall see, having technology mediate the spread of a social asset between a user and his or her friends allows the automated construction of a direct response advertisement, albeit an electronic one, from the information the user enters into the social oracle.

Automating the Subject (Headline)

The subject lines of the e-mails sent out by the social oracles have an analogous function to the headlines of printed advertisements, namely, to get the recipients to read the body copy. Both social oracles use subject lines aimed at piquing the recipient's curiosity and self-interest - two features of good printed headlines (Caples, 1997) - in order to entice the recipient to view the e-mail's body. For example, the Love Detective generates the same headline each time: 'Do you like me too?' which suggests that the recipient will get information about a person that likes him or her. The Compatibility Game uses a more personalized approach, taking the two names a user enters, and building the subject line: name1 and name2?!? For instance, if a user enters 'Fred' and 'Wilma,' the game creates the subject line: Fred and Wilma?!? The recipient, as a friend of the user, probably knows the individuals listed in the subject line, and is likely to read the body of the e-mail because it hints at containing interesting social information about those individuals.

Creating a good subject line that persuades a recipient to open up and read the body of an e-mail, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for an effective advertising mechanism. The body of the e-mail must lure the recipient into visiting the business's Web site.

Automating the Body Copy (E-Mail Message)

The classic body copy of a printed advertisement contains the following features, in no particular order: (1) problem description; (2) promise of solution; (3) explanation of promise; (4) proof; and (5) a call for action (Stone & Jacobs, 2001). YNM's social oracles automatically construct advertisements that contain explicit representations of three of these features: the promise of a solution (feature 2), a call for action (feature 5), and proof (feature 4).

In both the Love Detective and Compatibility Game (refer to Figure 1-25 and Figure 1-24), the 'promise of a solution' - a valuable or interesting piece of social information - is given in the first line of the message, namely: Hi. Someone *really* likes you but is very shy so you have to guess who it is ;-); and A friend ran the ˜Banana Love Test' for you , respectively. The 'call for action' immediately follows , and is implemented as a hypertext link to the Love Detective or Compatibility Game on YNM. Compatibility results follow the link, as a kind of 'proof' of the useful information the recipient will get by visiting YNM. For the Love Detective, the compatibility results are computed for the user who sent the e-mail and the recipient. For the Compatibility Game, the results are computed for the two people listed in the subject of the e-mail.

Figure 1-24: Compatibility Game e-mail

Figure 1-25: Love Detective e-mail

The missing features - 'problem description' and 'explanation of promise' - are not explicitly represented in the e-mail body because they are readily inferred from the information listed in the first line of the message. This is not necessarily true in advertisements for consumer products where the utility of a product may not be readily apparent to the user. For example, a consumer may not know that a water-jet toothbrush combats gingivitis better than a regular toothbrush; thus, those features must be explicitly noted in product advertisements.

Automating the Coupon (Hypertext Links)

To complete the transformation of the e-mails sent by the social oracles into advertisements, some structure must be present that helps the recipients visit the business's Web site and become potential customers. In a printed advertisement, this structure is a coupon: an area within the body copy that consumers can cut out and mail back to the advertiser to either order, inquire , or receive a discount on a product. The general function of the coupon is to turn the reader of an advertisement into a potential customer.

For YNM's social oracles the analog to a coupon is a hypertext link embedded within the e-mail message. The recipient merely has to click on this link to bring up a browser with the Web site preloaded. Compared to a coupon in a printed advertisement, hypertext links have the benefits of ease-of-action, immediate response, and multiplicity. YNM's social oracles automatically place the hypertext link after the first line in the message, specifically , after the 'promise of a solution,' and also at the end of the message.

Finally, it should be noted that it is possible to embed a coupon-like form within an e-mail. However, the hypertext link provides a simpler action for the recipient, a click, compared to filling out a form. Recall the main function of a coupon is to turn a reader into a potential customer. Getting the e-mail recipient to visit the Web site accomplishes this function. Once at the site, the business has considerably more flexibility in terms of turning the potential customer into an actual one.

Reason 4: Social assets are memes, not viruses

Embedding advertisements with hyperlinks into electronic messages is becoming increasingly common, particularly with e-mail messages. For example, Hotmail.com, Microsoft's free e-mail service, automatically appends a hyper-linked advertisement to every e-mail a user sends out (Figure 1-26). This practice is more commonly known as viral marketing - automatically attaching an unrelated advertisement to an electronic message so that the sender of the message inadvertently spreads the advertisement to a recipient. If the user has a need for the product or service in the advertisement, he or she clicks on the link.

But it would be incorrect to label the e-mails sent by the social oracles as a kind of viral marketing. In a viral e-mail, the advertisement is separate from the user's message , as Figure 1-26 (bottom) makes apparent. In the e-mails sent by the social oracles, the advertisement is the user's message.

Figure 1-26: Example of viral marketing

The social oracles transform a user's message - the social asset generated by using an oracle - into an advertisement by sending only a portion of the asset to the recipient, e.g., compatibility scores, but not the explanations of the scores (Figure 1-24). By sending a partial social asset and instructing the recipient to go to the site for the complete asset, the recipient is lured into visiting the site and the e-mail accomplishes its advertising function (Figure 1-27).

Figure 1-27: Information activity map depicting how the partial assets sent by the social oracles lure customers to YNM (W)

It is important to understand that not just any piece of information can be broken up in this manner and made into an advertisement. Social assets are special because they are information that individuals use to construct cultural models . Quinn and Holland (1987) define cultural models as, 'models of the world that are widely shared by members of a society and that play an enormous role in their understanding of the world and their behavior in it' (p. 4). Members of a community are constantly constructing cultural models as well as freely sharing the information needed to construct such models, typically through talk (D'Andrade, 1981), but with the emergence of the Internet, through other media as well. Thus, what is actually happening when a user plays a social oracle on YNM and sends the results to a friend, who in turn visits YNM to play the same social oracle, is a kind of technology-mediated form of cultural model sharing and construction.

In closing, Dawkins (1976) calls information that spreads from person to person within a community or culture, a 'meme'. The information returned by the social oracles, the social assets, qualify as memes. Thus, the use of social oracles to create potential customers is more properly a kind of memetic marketing (Flor, 2000), rather than a form of viral marketing. Memetic marketing is distinguished from viral marketing, in that the message sent to a recipient is a meme, and the advertisement is designed around, and related , to the meme, unlike viral marketing, where the content of the message and advertisement are unrelated to one another.