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The myth of BIG data OR what makes us human

Last week I attended the international ticketing conference INTIX in Denver. It’s the biggest entertainment ticketing conference in the world. I participated in a session that was all about the use of Big Data for the purpose of better running event ticketing operations and achieving overall better business results. At some point I asked the presenter if he had done any benchmarking of his predicative analysis comparing results in the US and Canada.  (One has to understand that privacy laws in Canada are much more stringent than in the US, giving a data mining company very little accuracy to work with). His answer was that there was only a marginal difference between the two countries in terms of predicative results.

Having looked at the value of BIG data for the last 10 years, I have grown very skeptical that consumers can be profiled to predict behavior. Big data works well to understand historical data. However there is no proof that big data actually works to predict the future buying behavior of a consumer. Take for example the effectiveness of online display advertising (this does NOT include search advertising). Google is reporting an average click-through-rate of 0.2% for their display network! With all the data and behavioral tracking this appears very low. Of course there is this fundamental misunderstanding that users are always looking to buy something. The fact of the matter is we don't. In contrary the point of being bombarded with about 1,700 online ads every week has made us grow immune to any form of online ads – we just don't see them anymore. Ask yourself how many ads do you remember over the last three days. None? Trust me you’re not alone.

Today we have access to so much data and so much cheap computing power that we should be able to predict anything that involves human behavior, if Big Data would allow us to – however the fact is we can’t. Stock markets keep on crashing, epidemics keep on forming and disappearing, city and infrastructure planning keeps on being wrong. It’s true that big data allows us to understand the past better but it does not give us anything to predict the future. Humans don't just have physical properties, our brains don't work like machines and we are highly influenced by our social environment. Remember the old saying that the flap of a butterfly wing in China can cause a hurricane to build in the Caribbean – and while this may not be completely true, the message is that our world is a world dominated by chaotic and therefore unpredictable reactions. Little unexpected events can have massive consequences – a terrorist attack cannot be predicted but can put the world at the brink of war and the stock markets to crash from one day to another. Falling in love with a stranger can change the path of one’s live forever. Our unpredictable nature is exactly what makes us human. Big data is not going to change that.

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Authors don't know their readers anymore.

Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service offers access to 700,000 books — both self-published and traditionally published — for $9.99 a month. Amazon has more than three million eBooks in its store today. This creates a significant financial burden for authors – the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/1xGgr53) reports that some of them have seen their revenues drop as much as 75%. There is also suspicion that Amazon is making books a loss leader (for their authors) to attract buyers to other departments of their humongous web store.

Over the last 50 years the publishing industry has lost contact with its roots focusing primarily on book distribution instead of readership development. And this is precisely the reason why many authors don't sell the books they write. In many ways a successful author is no different from any other brand offering products to its customers. But while most other brands have detailed knowledge about their target customers, authors and most of the traditional publishing houses don't have much insight about who their readers are and what their readers want. Most of the books written today are written without little or no reader feedback at all – a model posing a significant financial risk to both the publisher and the author. Publishers focus on ubiquitous book availability and marketing and self published authors focus on hope.

This was not always the case – Charles Dickens published his first novels in a weekly journal “All Year Round” creating a readership that was waiting with great anticipation what would come next (week). Today authors often make their readers wait for months or years until they publish their next book. Developing an engaged and loyal readership requires constant contact, dialogue and fresh content – all the time. Successful bloggers engage their readers often better than many authors who write for months before they let anybody see what they created.

I fundamentally believe that authors, who find a way to engage their readers on a continuous basis, create dialogue and retain access to them, will be successful. The Internet and cost effective publishing platforms like ours at 48bricks.com, allow authors to provide their readers continuously with fresh content, create dialogue and build an ever-growing asset of reader data that they can retarget on demand for future book launches. The Internet once cornered the phrase “from niches to riches” – something that was true for most of every product – but books. Authors have not participated in this because they don’t own the entire life cycle of their product. They “just” write the book, then ask their publishers to produce and market it. Publishers in turn leave it to the likes of Amazon and other retailers to “deal” with the readers – a big mistake but easily avoidable.

One of the first authors utilizing our publishing and marketing platform was #1 New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi. In only 2 months he published three eBooks exclusively on our platform and since updated two of them with additional chapters already. Corsi (www.CorsiOnJFK.com) received hundreds of direct reader interactions utilizing his social media channels and Tumblr blogs to create dialogue with his readership not just reviews. In doing so, he has very much reinvented the eBook for his purposes and is about to fundamentally change the way he interacts with his readers building a community of fans around his brand – an approach that any author can take.

If you are an author or publisher and are interested in learning more about 48Bricks’ approach, you can contact me directly through my blog or at michael@48bricks.com.

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Chuck Morse is joined by Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, author of "Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination" in a discussion about a major new revelation that puts to rest the single shooter hypothesis as promoted by the Warren Commission. Link: www.CorsiOnJFK.com

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eBOOKS reloaded - How authors are reinventing the eBook genre

An eBook is just a book in electronic form – right? That’s what the industry made it to be without any consideration of the potential of this new medium. However this is about to change. Authors are beginning to discover and use the unique features of eBooks in a way that will create an entirely new genre of book. Think of an eBook as a series much like on TV, that is being added to as long as readers are interested in the subject.

Authors like Jerome Corsi are experimenting with great success to overcome the inflexibility of hardcover books and create “living” books, where he is in permanent direct contact with his readership. In his latest two eBooks www.CorsiOnEBOLA.com and www.CorsiOnJFK.com, he uses eBooks to stay on top of world moving events while continuously soliciting and incorporating feedback of his readers. He understands that his readership has a wealth of knowledge on his subjects that he simply needs to harvest to offer more complete and relevant content. Corsi tries to play the role of a catalyst in the discovery and presentation of content assembling collective knowledge and opinion instead of defining his own. There is a certain Wikipedia effect when it comes to writing using this technique that holds huge potential in creating content that is richer and more complete versus the tradition research methods of conventional writing.

While it is obvious that the series style is appropriate for any non-fiction matter, it also holds great potential for fiction. If people can follow for years series like Mad Men or the Sopranos, there is really no reason why the same shouldn't be possible in books. Imagine a novel that is being added to every week to keep readers engaged - potentially for many years.

The economic benefits of such new writing are immense. Authors can experiment with a topic by “testing” the market before they commit to months or years of efforts to write a full-fledged book. The low production cost of eBooks has significantly less economic risk to both the author and the publisher. And while Amazon due to its protective reader data management does not seem a likely player in this new field, upstarts like www.48Bricks.com are creating the environment for publishers to fully embrace this new form of media. By offering reader data and direct communication channels as well as viral marketing methods, 48Bricks enables publishers to break free of the traditional model and create new opportunity for an entire industry. 

20 years ago Amazon reinvented book sales - it's time to do it again!

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New Research into the JFK Assassination reports on the most important new research into the JFK assassination. Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. believes investigations into the subject are close to establishing irrefutable evidence documenting the JFK assassination a government-organized coup d’état, not the act of a lone-gun assassin.

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Amazon is killing it !?

Indie authors at Amazon are like workers without union. Amazon knows that the future of publishing is in e-books. They own the market and soon they own the authors. Eliminating big publishers has led to significantly lower bargaining power with Amazon. The only way to avoid getting squeezed to the bare minimum is for authors to develop their readership and directly connect to them. That again requires a completely new model for publishing and distribution - think peer-to-peer, think viral, think re-targetable. (www.48bricks.com)

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EBOLA - Battling The Crisis

Corsi is on a mission not only to educate about EBOLA but also to reinvent the e-book as a news media tool and living document. The #1 New York Times Bestselling Author is disrupting the conventional way by publishing his new e-book without any Amazon and alike on CorsiOnEbola.com

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EBOLA - Battling the Crisis

Reading on how the world is battling EBOLA by Jerome Corsi - I think that this new form of e-book that is continuously being updated is the new kind of reading. www.CorsiOnEbola.com

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48Bricks' 2014 eBook Contest

You wrote a great book and you have great fans – it’s time to sell and make some money. Join our annual eBook contest. 48Bricks is offering 10 free marketing and sales campaigns to the best-connected writers. Participants keep 100% of their profits. Click here to participate! It's free.

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Social Currency … an effective crowdfunding strategy

Crowdfunding is all about getting people to fund your project – right? Yes, but there is a really important additional aspect when it comes to starting your campaign. 

Let’s assume you are successful and people are really catching on and fund your project. You go off and build a great product and now what? Who’s buying it? Did you think how to roll it out to the market? 97% of all Kickstarter projects that raised more than $100,000 fail! Ouch, sounds like a huge waste of money to me! There are many reasons for projects to fail but one of the most important causes is bad execution and part of it is a poorly planned market rollout. You think that you’re just building your really cool and useful product and the market will come - WRONG! If you don’t know how to sell your product, don’t bother developing it. So what has all this to do with crowdfunding? Well, you should use your crowdfunding project to build mindshare and a market that you can use to sell your product.

At 48Bricks.com we thought a lot about how to build a platform that allows brands to raise money and build mindshare at the same time. We combined our proprietary tracking and conversion technology in a highly gamified platform with the goal to identify your top tastemakers and engage them to generate a viral stream of leads that come back to your campaign site. We value sharing of top tastemakers at least as high as pledges and we believe that they deserve great rewards for becoming your brand advocate – it’s called Social Currency. Top brand advocates will find donors for you plus help you build mindshare and therefore a market with their followers. Think about building your campaigns with that in mind. Don’t just focus on the money; focus on mindshare and the money will come.

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Viral strategies – how to make people share        

Did you know that 72% of all Millennials want to be the source of information TO a friend and only 28% of them want to be informed BY a friend? People want to be tastemakers!

When we started 48Bricks.com last year, we wanted to create the best platform for marketers to find tastemakers and engage them to spread their brand message. And apart from developing unique tracking and conversion technology, we deeply dove into the psychology of what makes tastemakers tick and created a gamified campaign process catering specifically to their behavioral characteristics. One of the key elements that we exploit is “social currency”. Research has shown that people share when they think that they have something to offer that makes them shine in front of their followers. You probably all remember when LinkedIn sent you an email declaring that you are one of the top 1%, 5% or 10% most viewed profiles on LinkedIn. And you probably remember also that a lot of people shared this message with their friends on social media. This was a very good example of exploring social currency for brand promotion purposes – in this case LinkedIn. When you want people to share, give them something that they perceive of making them look cool or smart in front of their friends. Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange found that over 60% of people share “interesting things” and 42% of people share “important or funny things”.

An increasing number of companies use social currency to reward their most effective brand advocates with free products or services. While there is nothing wrong to acknowledge the great value true brand advocates bring to the table, brands need to be careful not to game the system. Shares equate to digital word of mouth and it is important for both the fan and the brand that shares comes across as authentic. True and lasting brand advocate relationships are built on the brand listing to their fans and truly engaging with them – making them part of the marketing process and not just a tool. (If you are interested in learning more about this, I recommend Jonah Berger’s book Contagious – Why things catch on.)

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... another drawing from Emily for our Haiyan relief campaign at bricksforhope.com. Spread the word and help rebuild the Philippines. Your contribution is a simple repost :)

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check out Emily Rodger's cute little campaign girl ... she is doing a series of pro bono drawings for our Philippines relief campaign . See more of her other work on her FB page. Thanks Emily!

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Bricks-For-Hope is the world’s first crowd-sourced reconstruction project! Caritas Manila is using the latest technology to unite the global community to rebuild Salcedo in Eastern Samar (Philippines), an area that was badly devastated by #Haiyan. Check it out:www.bricksforhope.com

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I really like your blog. Esspecially the post about that we are moving away from words to pictures which I always new was kind of ridiculous. I wanted to know why are you using kickstarter and not some traditional form of funding ie angel/mentor for seed funding?

Thanks for following me. We're using both traditional investing and our own crowd funding platform. The reason is that we believe that using crowd funding will allow more people to get involved and show their support. Our philosophy is to create mindshare and by just having a few big investors, we forgo this opportunity. If you believe that great ideas need people to think and talk about them - spread the word :)

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48Bricks is a new yield management and crowd fundraising platform. We ensure that you reach your consumers and meet your revenue goals