Privacy is valuable. Value it, consciously, and spend it, wisely.

Found, @Newseum, Washington DC

Privacy is a conversational black hole. “Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape.” (link)

We all love to talk about privacy. The reality, however, is that:

Most users care about privacy but don’t think about it in day-to-day life.

Few people truly value privacy.
Seriously. We all value privacy in the big, philosophical, fundamental “human right to privacy”, in the sense that we agree that it’s important, and we hold the idea near and dear to our heart, and we’ll get upset, justifiably, if our right to privacy is violated.

But few people value the marginal costs and benefits to privacy at the granular level that would allow us to make reasoned decisions about what we choose to share and not share. What’s the price of privacy? What’s the value of publicity?

Example: do you consciously think about the pros and cons, the marginal value and benefit, the full impact of what you share on the web, or a Tweet, a Facebook post, a Flickr picture or a blog post? Do you consider what could happen in the short and long-term?

No. Why? In many ways, we can’t.

We haven’t developed these heuristics yet. Our guts are still figuring out the equations that compress a lot of information and thought into a “gut call” about the impact of what we do online.

It’s hard. And as Alan Patrick has pointed out many times over the past two years, widespread adoption of web services have contributed to privacy erosion. Fundamentally, individual users don’t have the power, incentive or ability to reliably influence how companies use our data, thus our data is free but everywhere in chains. Companies haven’t given us enough information or guidance about how our data is (and will be) used, we evaluate each decision on the margin without considering how all our decisions add up, and we undervalue our privacy, making poor decisions about how we use web services.

But of course, not only do we get something for using those services, but we also get something for spending our privacy.

My comment to my friend Jim Goldstein on his post Privacy: You’ve Just Given It Away What Next?

What about the value of making something public?

There are valuable, tangible, even measurable benefits to making information public. As long as it’s within our control, and we can value the benefits and costs of our decisions, that’s all that matters. Private, public, whatever.

The issue isn’t about privacy per se, but control over data, where it goes, who sees it, putting it into (and taking it out of) the stream of information that people see, interact with, and act upon.

But this is a conversation we’ve had before :)

I share what I choose to share because it creates the friction that brings people and passions together. It’s not the only way, and I don’t share everything: but I share what I share because I think the benefits are worth the costs. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ll learn by doing and testing. I’ll learn by spending my privacy.

Wisely, of course.

How? Consider the misplaced debate about privacy; the real debate is over control, not privacy.

Noah Brier, Stalked? Not Really: Noah Brier Responds:

At the end of the day a breach of privacy requires some reasonable expectation that something would be kept private. Not only did I not have that expectation, but for much of the information I put on the web I hope for exactly the opposite.

Exactly.

We don’t just “give away privacy.”
We use services and exchange our time, money and attention to get something back from using that service. There’s a value exchange there. We’re explicitly opt-ing in to use the service under those terms, good and bad. Don’t like it? Quit.

Why did “quit Facebook day” flop? Because even if we don’t like how Facebook handles their product decisions, privacy settings, etc., we get enough value out of using it that it’s worth it to put up with the pain.

Remember that Facebook is a business. Their choice on how to manage privacy is a business decision. As my buddy Ethan put it:

“The business model they appear to be pursuing makes Facebook’s interest to erode/obfuscate privacy *just* to the marginal point before which there would be a mass exodus. No more “privacy”, no less.”

And to be honest, we shouldn’t expect Facebook to look at it in any other way. It’s up to us, the market, the aggregate of all of us, to tell Facebook what we want. Not just tell, but to *do*. What we do indicates what we agree on; markets are aggregations of actions. That’s how a market works, whether it’s a market based on money, attention or any other measure of value. And if enough people don’t like it, or use it, or pay for it (depending on the business model), then it won’t be successful, and it won’t exist.

And the fact that we didn’t quit en mass says something pretty powerful.

Yes, Facebook “should” make it easy for people to manage how their data flows. But I argue it’s not because of morals or ethics, but just good business.

Granted, increasingly, in many ways today opt-ing out of technology is opt-ing out of society. We’re drawn into using some services because we simply have to. But we can still choose how we use them.

Underlying this is a powerful investment opportunity. More personal data, services, networks and connections creates the opportunity for better curators, filters, blockers, and routers of data. The value in content isn’t in content but in how it flows, how it gets added to, remixed, rerouted, represented.

But that’s a thought for another day.

Doing good is good business. “Social good” can be the base of a strong business model, and I believe we’re steadily coming closer to a point where a business without a “social good” is not a sustainable business. And I’m not talking about environmentally, culturally or morally sustainable, but strategically, economically and financially sustainable.

When I hear the words “social entrepreneurship”, the first thing I hear is “entrepreneurship”, not social. I come from to the world of social business from the perspective of an educated and trained hard-core capitalist, a management consultant, an Excel geek, an MBA with a concentration in finance and accounting, an ex-private equity / corporate raider and a man who thinks numbers first. And since quantifying “social good” is hard, I tended to push it aside.

But over time, I learned that “social good” matters. It matters to us, our lives, our communities, our environment, our society. That’s obvious.

It also matters to business.

Social good has traditionally been an externality that businesses could not value, measure and rank, so they choose to downgrade or ignore it as an input to business decisions. It’s not just a choice between short-term impact and long-term impact, but a choice between the impact we can see, measure and be accountable for and the impact that we have. The full impact that we have can be difficult to measure even in the short term, as the cost and value of our business model externalities tend to disappear from our profit and loss statements. We’ve tried to bring these externalities back to the table with “modified” accounting statements, balanced scorecards and other decision-making frameworks, but they’ve failed to gain the same traction as the simple, culturally-known and corporate-benchmark corporate financial statements.

But we haven’t given up, because companies have come to learn that unaccounted and unvalued business model externalities lead to sub-optimal decision-making and reduced performance: financially, operationally and competitively.

Umair Haque, Why Betterness is Good Business:

Striving to do more good is associated with greater profitability, equity and asset returns, and shareholder value creation. But that’s still not good enough. Today, the bar is being raised: success is itself changing. Those are yesterday’s metrics of success — more importantly, maximizing good lets companies outperform on tomorrow’s measures of success.

More and more, investors aren’t just looking for near-terms financial returns: they’re looking for financial returns *plus.* Why? Because the *plus* makes returns less risky, more defensible, and, the biggie, more meaningful. As the expectations of people, communities, society, and investors change, the definition of outperformance itself is changing.

Umair supports this with data from a number of research reports proving the need for companies to adapt their measures of performance, for the simple reason that people now demand a different kind of performance. Financial isn’t enough. Financial returns *plus* is necessary. And interestingly enough, as we get better at measuring the *plus*, the *plus* will disappear, because we’ll have developed new measures of business model success. Based on ideals or “betterness”, these business models will matter, and that’s why they’ll succeed.

They’ll succeed because they’ll tap into “The Power of Pull”, tap into the edges of their networks, bring the edge to the core, tap into the power of serendipity, and open themselves up to “that which cannot be completely measured today”.

These business models will leverage the passion of individuals, create networks and build communities. They’ll provide ways for people to connect, to build, to contribute, to give. They’ll let employees be people. They’ll build products with a purpose. They’ll build companies with a purpose, with a mission that is understood, supported and created by their employees, customers and fans.

We won’t do it just because it’s socially responsible. We won’t do it because we’re in some utopian “post-consumer” era. We’ll do it because it’s strategically, economically and financially necessary. We’ll do it because these are the types of innovations that can be disruptive and sustainable today. We’ll do it because…

Rising hyperconnectivity and the increasingly publicly available trails of intentions and actions by individuals and corporations are creating the opportunity for an ethical edge to “pay” in a wider range of products, markets and industries.

We’ll do it because information, stories, content and context scale easier, cheaper and faster than ever before. We’ll do it because companies will have to understand how to create and tell stories about their business, impact, relevance and meaning to stay competitive. We’ll do it because obfuscating the truth or hiding externalities will be an expensive, inefficient, suboptimal business strategy.

We’ll do it not because it’s “social good”, but because it’s good business. And that’s the type of social entrepreneurship I care about.

Creating rich, immersive and scalable experiences is the biggest opportunity in marketing today, and “experience artists” are going to play a large, rich role in marketing going forward.

The evolution of a thought is a funny thing. I’ve long obsessed over the idea of context, inspired and shaped by Umair Haque’s line of thinking about user generated context, markets, networks and communities and many of his other principles.

Later, I picked up the idea of culturematics from Grant McCracken, a concept I’ve applied in thinking about communities, the power of “doing cool (meaningful) stuff”", and creating relevant, shareable events and experiences as participatory “marketing” campaigns.

About “doing cool (meaningful) stuff”:

“Cool stuff” grows only if it resonates, if it’s meaningful, if people care. “Cool stuff” are the small-scale, human examples of the power of focusing on creating rather than capturing, of focusing on product instead of marketing. Demonstrations of the power of living a life too cool to ignore.

“Doing cool (meaningful) stuff” is powerful because it’s the foundation behind turning relevant, shareable events and experiences into participatory “marketing” campaigns:

I believe there is a huge opportunity for people to follow their passion and evil plans to create relatable experiences and culturematics as “marketing campaigns.” Because these experiences are inherently human, they can invade niches and propagate through communities cheaper, better and faster than traditional marketing efforts.

… What are the keys? Passion, meaningfully directed. Transparency. Authority. A unique point of view. An ability to connect discrete actions to a meaningful cause. Resonance with a community. An obvious, transparent business model that “fits” the product, service, experience and community.

In my recent post, “Instead of focusing on the image, focus on everything around the image”, I applied the continuation of these thoughts to the photography industry.

But it’s a concept that applies to all forms of marketing.

Creating rich, immersive and scalable experiences is the biggest opportunity in marketing today, and “experience artists” are going to play a large, rich role in marketing going forward.

Why? To repeat (and add to) my recent post,

• Content is far easier to copy than context.
• Content is cheap to create and distribute, but context is (still) expensive.
• Content creation is an evolutionary process. The evolution builds valuable, immersive, rich context for leaders and shapers to create and guide the markets, networks and communities behind the evolution.

  How? The path taken to create content impacts the final product, but the path to create context is *part of the final product*. Remember, paths are more valuable than destinations.

• The economics of the web have increased the competition between content creators, flattened the experience advantage and upended supply and demand for content. But at the same time, it’s expanded the opportunity to create context, made context easier, cheaper and more accessible to create than ever before. People that recognize how context is created, what type of context they can create, and why context is important will create economically meaningful, valuable and sustainable products, services and experiences. And more than anything, that’s what we need.
• Marketers and business strategists today are fond of giving the advice “join the conversation.” While I agree, it’s only a step towards the larger goal: “create shared experiences”. First: join, listen, learn and understand the best practices, cores and edges in your markets, communities and networks, because it’s step one towards building the knowledge and confidence to take the next step: “create shared experiences”.
• Experiences are more powerful than conversations in creating the rich, immersive context, social objects and shareable, participatory media necessary for marketing campaigns. David Cushman and Jamie Burke asked “Can you buy space in conversations?” in their recent presentation about The Death of Advertising; to extend the thought, my question is “can you buy space in experiences?” Conversations, no; but experiences, yes.

Lest one think of this as idle thought, the examples are being created by bleeding edge practitioners today.

If you’d like to discuss examples and see how you can apply these concepts to your business, drop me a line at tdavidson@taylordavidson.com or @tdavidson; hire me to consult and I’ll help you devise strategies and execute campaigns applying these principles.

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I’m moving to New Orleans, Louisiana. Here’s why.

Last year didn’t turn out as I had planned. This year I stopped planning and just lived, and in doing so finally created “The Good Year” that I had envisioned for a number of years.

My simple goal was to spend a year traveling, following my passions, exploring and creating without any expectations for it to pay off right away. I wanted to test my idea that the universe will take care of me if I let it and give myself the time and space to let the year lead to something bigger.

The original idea was to spend a month of two in about eight different places, to live, work and photograph lives in each city, to dig into each new place and culture as a temporary citizen. The goal wasn’t to find myself or explore the world, but to live and observe different lives around the world.

But it didn’t go as planned. For one, after I quit my job last November I spent the next twelve months driving across the USA, bouncing on trains throughout Europe and flying around the world. Each time I tried to stay in one place and slow down, I found myself moving on and going faster. Why?

In short, the draw of people and opportunities over the horizon, the beckoning of the next place, the next person to meet, the next experience to create.

And secondly, the planned year of observing became a year of interacting, creating and sharing. Each step forward, each hello, each exploration, each person and each story led me to another, simply by embracing the opportunity, listening, caring and giving. The solitary journey evolved into a shared adventure, connecting thoughts to thoughts, thoughts to people, people to people, powered by serendipity, part of an introvert’s awakening, thirty-one years in the making.

It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Littered throughout the year were misplaced steps, missed connections, miscalculations, incomplete thoughts, failed challenges, hopes and ideas dashed by realities, limitations and mistakes.

But even with the numerous failures, I’m still looking forward to where it could lead.

And thus, with “The Good Year” drawing to a close, having tested and found the limitations of the way I lived this year, it’s time to change it up and find a better way to live another good year (and more). For me, for now, that means I need to live in one place and build a core to bring together the edges I’ve opened throughout the year.

I considered lots of places to live, focusing on the typical hubs of business, culture and recreation that regularly grace the “best places to live” reports and pop up in the “what is your city” quizzes I’ve taken repeatedly, trying to think about what’s important and envision alternate lives.

Nothing ever indicated New Orleans.

But that’s where this year has led me. New Orleans first popped up though introductions by Lyell to Chris and Jessica, my first real tests of a year of showing up, meeting new people and asking friends and acquaintances to help curate my life.

As the year continued, New Orleans kept popping up, interjecting herself into conversations, showing up in my mind, my heart, my memories. I lingered over photos I took of the Quarter and the Garden district. Every news article with a snippet about New Orleans drew my attention. I felt a tug every time I saw news about friends doing cool stuff in New Orleans, stung by a small bit of feeling of missing out. I extolled the virtues of New Orleans as an example of one of the few unique, culturally vibrant American cities, proclaiming my love for New Orleans to fellow travelers in Bulgaria, Japan, India, Australia, Malaysia and England.

But I never told New Orleans that I loved her, with the type of love that’s only seen a glimpse and is unsure what lies deeper underneath, but is sure of itself nonetheless. The type of love that needs to be demonstrated and shown, not just said.

What better way to show it than to move there?

And that’s my early Christmas gift to myself: a home, an opportunity, a life.

Of course, I’m going to need your help, New Orleans. I’m scared the rush of a new city will fade quickly. I’m worried it will take me awhile to settle in, based on my mixed past in establishing lives in past cities. I’m nervous about not living up to expectations. I’m worried about creating a professional life that fits my professional and life goals (more, later *). In a way, I’m scared of getting what I want.

But I’m going to try.

I’ve never truly loved a city or a community; New Orleans, I’m hoping you can help change that.

So New Orleans, I’m moving here for you and for me. I’ll love you and give you my all. All I ask is for you to love me back.

—

* Later, a deeper dive into why New Orleans is a great professional opportunity for me and many others. But first, start with Sloane‘s great summary of what New Orleans has to offer and my past thoughts on New Orleans’ opportunity to leverage its vibrant cultural life into a vibrant hub for entrepreneurs (video, about 1 minute in). More to come.

Kleenex, anyone?