On Sticker-Speak

Some of the stickers available within Facebook’s Messenger app.

In a March 2007 post subtitled ‘How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Just Get With The Blip-Post Programme’ I wrote that

“the ultimate logical step will be for someone to create a social networking site that just posts individual tag words on their own…” 

While I was positing that notion with tongue firmly in cheek, it is interesting to observe that we now do have the ability to communicate using absolutely simple, single-concept message units. The emojii-based stickers of today’s messaging apps are the example I have been thinking about recently. At first glance the idea behind these stickers appears trivial, indeed faintly silly. Scroll through the sticker selection panels in any messaging app and you will see rows of cute cartoon characters over-acting and gurning some exaggerated emotion.

But I think that if we look a little bit deeper there is something interesting going on here. So, while the audience for this blog is unlikely to embrace the use of pictographic stickers in their everyday messaging, it is always worthwhile for anyone working in branding, design and app development to observe the trends and be aware of what different kinds of communications are bubbling up.
People are choosing to use these stickers to communicate in some manner. So they definitely have a job-to-be-done. What that job may be, and indeed what might be the minimum that we need for viable digital communication seems worth exploring here.

Minimum Viable Communications
Firstly, I do not think that it is a given fact that the idea of simplified, single-concept message units would necessarily be seen as useful and become broadly accepted. That core idea needs to be provided as a service in a manner that people find appealing to use. In the mid-nineties, when I was doing a lot of design work for Telecom Eireann, mobile phones were still expensive products aimed at businesses. Telecom Eireann tried to kick-start a youth market for pagers as a more price-appropriate product. They launched a range of pagers in Ireland with a heavily promoted and expensive Eurotrash-themed advertising campaign which struggled and failed to make pagers seem hip. Although hobbled by ill-advised advertising creative, the real downfall of the product was that, given the available technology of the time, the low-budget devices could only send three-digit numeric codes. People could not message each other in plaintext. So to use a pager you needed to carry a booklet with an unwieldy list of arbitrary meanings ascribed to those numerical pager codes. Something like ‘234 = I am running late’ and ‘678 = Drinks later?’ The pager market never took off. The limitations imposed on communication outweighed the promise of being able to communicate on the move. The target audience just ignored pagers and waited for mobile phones to become affordable. So this was not a failure of the idea of simplified minimal communications per se, but rather of their service execution in a form that was difficult to use, and which did not convey meaning.

Jump forward to today and most smartphone operating systems have incorporated Japanese i-Mode emoji icons. These simple, single-concept icons are inter-operable with the Western character set within text messages. Most often I see people appending emoji as suffixes to text messages. Using just one character the senders can add information about whether they are being ironic or playful in their message. Emoji solve the problem where, writing so concisely, we often must sacrifice tonality. So, at least in the usage which I observe, they act as modifiers to the main text. These eight words may not necessarily clearly signify whether the sender is optimistic, sarcastic or infuriated. That is the additional role given to the little yellow character at the end.

Where I do see emoji used on their own are generally as replies to written texts. A text asking ‘How did the meeting go?’ might get a thumbs-up emoji response. No words being necessary, as a conversation will provide the relevant detail later.

Although it is not a usage I see amongst my peers, emoji can even be strung together as a rudimentary pictographic language. If only for humorous intent more than anything. Yet, I think that if that was the only way of using them, they would necessarily fail in the same way as the pager codes did. Perhaps these kinds of single-concept pictographic linguistic tools are really only useful as an adjunct to the written word?

Messenging App Stickers
Stickers – although related to the original emoji – offer a new set of affordance and a different communicative role. Stickers can only be used one at a time and can not be mixed with text. This makes them ill-suited as modifiers and so they serve a different purpose. So while these pictures are not worth a thousand words, they are intended to be worth one text message.

Stickers take the basic idea of image-based emoji to a new level. They take advantage of the larger screens and higher resolutions of today’s mobile devices. So they appear larger on-screen and can be more illustrative and expressive in style and not limited to the more iconic style needed for emoji. They are often based on cartoon characters and portray a wider range of emotions and behaviours then emoji. (The emoji character set was originally developed for the technological limitations of i-Mode phones in at the end of the nineties.) As they are not trying to be part of one standardised international character set the range of sticker designs varies from app to app. Developers can strike licensing deals with IP owners to ensure that particular characters are available exclusively in their app to attract more customers.

Facebook’s Messenger app expands the expressive range of their ‘Like’ icon. 

Selling sets of digital stickers is one of the revenue-generating features of messaging apps. Remember that this is a category of apps whose key benefit is communication at no cost to their users. So I assume stickers must be popular — and with more than just Japanese teenagers. Stickers are serving some purpose for a broader set of users. As I see it stickers answer the desire for a one-touch, single-concept message.

It is not that people are becoming too lazy to compose simple sentences. It is worth remembering – before any doom-sayers begin to predict the end of literacy and language again – that new forms of communication like this never replace what already exists, they sit alongside them. Rather it is the case that – just as something as barely noticeable as a raised eyebrow or a wink can signify a lot in our real-world conversations – so too perhaps can the emotions of an illustrated character in our online conversations. The semantic meaning encoded in the smallest gestures depends on the context and the relationship between the two people communicating.

An examples of some of the character-based stickers available within the Viber app.

I would not underestimate how many text messages are rote and formulaic. People keeping in touch simply by saying ‘good morning’ or ‘good-night’. The real meaning here is in reaffirming the connection rather than in the specific semantic content. So adding some visual flair, through colour, image and typography the way that many stickers do can enhance such simple regular messages. Even if simply through novelty and variety.

An examples of some of the text-based stickers available within the Viber app.

The visual language of emoticons and stickers sits alongside spoken languages and people all over the world can use them to communicate. Even so, it would be foolish to consider them serving as a proxy for a common global visual language. While the majority of human emotional expressions do share their meaning amongst all peoples, there are still many distinct cultural signals and messages that are learned. (That is why trying to decipher some of the obscure-to-me Japanese cultural references symbolised in the original i-Mode emoticon set seems beyond my West-of-Ireland background.)

Red = ‘I am angry’
As a final thought, I suppose it is again worth considering what comes next? What is the truly Minimal Viable Communication? Should we expect an app that allows us to communicate using just solid colours perhaps? Yellow meaning ‘I am happy’, blue saying ‘I am sad’ and red growling ‘I am angry’... Who knows?

Update 1: June 2014
Given my line of thinking on Minimal Viable Communication here, I guess that I really should have foreseen the ‘Yo’ app. Very minimal indeed.

Update 2: July 2014
Further to my point about stringing emoji together as a pictographic language for humorous intent. Turns out that you can sign-up today to ‘Emojli’ – the emoji-only social network. That may not even be a parody, and is launching soon apparently.

(I guess the Garfield licensing deal fell through.)

Facebook URLs in Marketing Communications

Have you noticed the trend where some companies are now finding it advantageous to feature their Facebook Page web addresses more prominently than their own corporate web addresses in their printed advertising and marketing communications? While perhaps this primarily signifies the relative failures of many corporate websites against the ascendancy of Facebook, I think there is also a second story to tell here.

Free Labour and the Pool of Attention

What is the upper bound limit to the number of social media one can participate in usefully? Any answer will depend on one’s definitions of participation and utility.

I have been thinking about the amount of time and effort expended in maintaining and updating my presence on various social media platforms. What is the most productive use of my time? What has the greatest impact on ‘Brand Me’? What delivers the most benefits for my activity?

To answer those queries I need to review my assumptions about the nature of my relationship with each social media platform. I believe the axiom: “if you are not paying for the service, then you are the product of that service”. Which is a variation on the theories I learned about in Media Studies back in the late eighties where we were taught that newspapers do not sell news to consumers but audiences to advertisers. I am fine with that, as long as the positive benefits that I can extract from using the services still outweigh all of the well-known negatives. (While this is arguably a Faustian bargain, going in with your eyes open is at least the most appropriate stance.) Jeff Jarvis’ ongoing thesis on public-ness is probably the most insightful argument explaining this approach.

What I had not even been considering were the far broader, longer-term, macro-economic implications of the practices enabled by social media. These two articles from February expand on this topic.

They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free
This article by two English academics looks at Facebook through the lens of Media Theory and explores the concept of ‘free labour’. Putting their sensationalist headline aside, I think they realise that their ‘free labour’ analogy is a bit stretched and move towards a model of Facebook as a rent on our attention. But they are also aware that there can be no permanent lock-in to any social media network and that Facebook could still be superseded.

The $100bn Facebook question: will capitalism survive ‘value abundance’?
This eye-opening article on the crisis of value by Michel Bauwens refutes some of the earlier article’s arguments. Particularly by identifying the distinction between use value and exchange value. His thesis is that the Internet has facilitated “an exponential rise in the creation of use value by productive publics” which has a deflationary macro-economic impact. This sharing economy sets up many future problems for capitalist systems. Thus his key question becomes:

What will happen with capitalism given social media-based exchanges, commons-based production of software and hardware, and collaborative consumption, on an increasingly massive scale?

The ideas in both of these articles provide much to ponder on.

Update, 22 January 2013
It turns out that, within the EU, wherever there is labour there must inevitably also be taxes. The French government have commissioned a report on the value generated by ‘free labour’ to investigate how they can extract taxes from that value. The report is initially intended as leverage within the larger chess game taking place between Google and the French Press. The taxation angle is one intellectual contortion further than anything I had envisaged when originally writing this post.

Déjà-Vu Conversations

An interesting artifact of the accelerated social transitions that we are now experiencing.

Recently I have noticed a recurring social speed-bump in conversations with people who are dipping into my social media activity streams (and vice versa). The pattern runs something like this. One of us is recounting an anecdote, say about bringing the kids to the zoo last weekend, and the other party interjects with some variant of “oh yes, I saw something about that in your Facebook/Twitter/ Google+/Foursquare updates and was wondering what it was about...”

It is like a mild variant strain of Deja Vu.

The ‘ambient awareness’ identified by social scientists as a key component of our social media experience is there all right, but it is only an incomplete, partial awareness. Aspects of our real world conversations are haunted by indistinct outlines of semi-perceived experiential lacunae loitering around their edges.

My takeaway from this is that a lot of the social media content we are publishing is innately hindered, firstly, by its necessarily condensed syntax, and secondly by the partial nature of its consumption.

Someone accurately compared our social media activity streams to cocktail parties: in both situations when you arrive late you join the conversations at wherever point they are at and you do not backtrack. We read our friend’s status updates as we encounter them. We simply do not have time to go back and recap their complete chronology of all recent posts that we may have missed.

This is an interesting conundrum, as the trivial solution — to post more often and more accurately — would only increase the overall noise-to-signal ratio and might ultimately lead to some kind of a Tragedy Of The Commons zero-sum outcome. In the long term, and at a societal-level, I think that all of our conversational stratagems and conventions may evolve.

Has anyone else started to notice this as well?

#whowhatwherenow?

Google+ has now begun to establish itself as ‘Yet Another Inbox’ (YAIB) to be checked. It seems that every new Internet service establishes an onus on its users now to periodically devote time to checking for messages within the service. With the subsequent related risk of users then seeming to be standoffish for not responding to those messages.

Your number of inboxes will depend on your level of social media engagement. My own list presently includes Facebook, Twitter, Path, LinkedIn, Instagram, and still occasionally Flickr.

Although all of the various players would aspire to producing ‘One Social Network To Rule Them All’, I doubt that is feasible, and surely not desirable. So we can probably take it for now that our social graphs are not going to limit themselves to just one social network. And each of these networks creates a demand on our finite reserves of time.

Working from the basis that each of us wants to make best use of our social networks without getting drawn into a black hole of distraction and lost productivity. What then is our optimal strategy for managing all of our various social inboxes? A starting point is to think about each social network and what you intend to use it for. Who are you communicating with on each platform and for what purposes?

For example, it is easy to ring-fence LinkedIn as my online hub for career-related networking. There is the least amount of overlap between my LinkedIn connections and my other social networks. Messages within LinkedIn are invariably business-related. At this stage it is too early to say whether or not Google+ will enroach on business networking, but it is not improbable either.

The alternate approach is not to daisy-chain your social networks and to keep everything in separate  silos. Then all of the comments remain united within their own walled gardens. The downside of this approach is that only subsets of your total audience see your content on each of your unlinked networks. For instance, far more people see my Instagram photographs replicated on Facebook than on the native app. The comments on my Instagram photos are therefore split between both networks. The mandatory setting on Google+ is that no cross-posting is permitted from other services. Which is a valid stance for them to take, given the manner in which their Google Buzz product became simply a conduit for cross-posted tweets and never achieved a viable purpose of it own.

Become an Editor of Your User-Base

There are some good insights in Jack Dorsey’s deadpan presentation ‘Three keys to Twitter’s Success’ at the 99% Conference. He explains some interesting findings from his experience (starting at around 10:50), particularly how Twitter has grown by being “more or less an editor of its user-base and an editor of the usage”.

He recalls how they initially resisted a lot of the innovations being created outside of the company by their users. In the end they succeeded by being open enough to adopt the position of an editor and absorb all of the feedback and input, and then act on it and use it to drive rapid iteration and improvements.