Social Networking Your Car

An interesting article about crowdsourcing your car hit the wires this week.  Nissan’s new Leaf electric car (which began shipping recently) includes a wireless check-in feature that you can use to compete with other Leaf owners for energy efficiency awards.

It’s a pretty interesting idea: using the Carwings system (an OnStar-like system that originated in Japan) the Leaf wirelessly transmits your energy usage statistics to their servers.  The system then compares your usage to other Leaf owners in your region and awards trophies to the winners, which then display in the Leaf’s dashboard control center. 

In addition, the system uses data from drivers of other Carwings users (not just Leaf drivers) to aggregate and display near real-time traffic predictions, further enabling the Leaf driver to make intelligent decisions about energy economy.

This friendly competition seems an excellent way to encourage Leaf drivers to maximize their energy efficiency, but I wonder if it’s a good idea for the rest of us.  Let me explain: The concept of “hypermiling” (and it amuses me more than it should to include a hyperlink here) started a couple of years ago when drivers—particularly drivers of hybrid cars—began to wonder just how many miles-per-gallon they could actually get from their vehicle.  Unfortunately, some of the techniques they began to use were illegal and/or dangerous: things like tailgating to “draft” behind large trucks, turning the car on and off to coast in neutral, coasting through stop signs, and driving even more slowly in freeway slow lanes.

If we have hypermilers (including Leaf drivers) increasingly trying to use some of these techniques to optimize their miles, it may in fact cause those of us who aren’t hypermiling to burn more energy trying to avoid them or get around them.  The net effect is that if a hypermiler saves one ounce of fuel, but causes other people to burn more than one ounce of fuel, it’s a net loss for the energy system, not a net gain. (I do have to note that there are lots of ethical hypermilers out there that utilize *safe* and *legal* methods to squeeze those extra miles out of their cars, and I highly commend them.)

I’ve always been a proponent of giving people lots of information so they can make informed decisions.  The problem with the Leaf contest, in my humble opinion, is that without some education as to safe and legal ways to drive efficiently (and not inconvenience or endanger other drivers) is going to cause problems for other drivers.  Leaf drivers who’ve never heard of hypermiling or know what aspects of it are safe and legal may be encouraged by the competition to rediscover driving techniques that have already been tried by earlier hypermilers and discarded for safety reasons.  People seem to be very good at rediscovering inventive wrong things to do, and making them aware of safe ways to achieve energy efficiency should be a mandatory prerequisite to owning such a car.  Especially a car that encourages competition.

And if they really wanted this to be a fair and accurate competition as to who is using energy most efficiently, they should include mileage statistics from bicyclists and people working from home.

Social Media for the Holidays

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season. And in doing so ponder for a moment the role of online social networks in holiday celebrations.

I expect over the next couple of days to get and receive numerous Christmas greetings via Facebook and Twitter.  Also a few emails from those social network-challenged friends and family I have.  This isn’t a new phenomenon: people started to exchange holiday greetings via phone instead of mail (or in-person visits) early last century as phone technology began to be pervasive.  Similarly over the last 20 years, people started exchanging email greetings instead of phone or mail as email adoption grew.  It comes as no surprise that people would begin using online social networking tools to do the same. 

It seems different, however.  Before with Christmas cards, phone calls, and even to some extent emails, the greetings were more 1-on-1 (ok, granted you might have just sent an email to a Christmas list rather than individuals). You had to address, stamp and mail an individual Christmas card or dial an individual phone number. But now on Facebook, I can not only wish specific people a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, or May the Force be With You, I can wish all of them at once.  Further, most of them can see all of my personalized best wishes to my other friends as well.  This seems vastly more efficient, and yet somehow less personal.  On the one hand I can easily get a message out to family members that are hundreds or thousands of miles away, and to old friends I haven’t seen or talked to in years; on the other hand, it seems to lack the intimacy of even a simple phone call.

And thus the world changes. Not so much in big sweeping changes but in lots of little ones that add up over time. (If you haven’t yet seen it, check out the Social Media Nativity video below made by some very inventive people at Excentric.  Brilliant!) I suspect people younger than I think that Facebook messages (or Twitter, or emails, or SMS) are just as “intimate” and legitimate as phone calls or snail mail.

However you choose to express it, please make sure to share your holiday wishes with those close and not so close to you.  As for me, it’s been a genuine pleasure having you join me for my weekly blog messages, and I hope you’ll join me here again next year.  Best wishes to all my family, friends, coworkers and Twitter followers.

Overcoming the Creepy Treehouse

Let’s say you’re a kid again.  You and your friends in the neighborhood have played together at the local playground and at various other kid’s houses around your neighborhood.  One day, you notice that the house down the street that’s been for sale forever seems to have new occupants.  You look around for new kids that might live in the house, but you realize the couple that has moved in is an older couple that doesn’t appear to have any.  Yet, inexplicably, a few days later you see a marvelous new treehouse in that big tree in their front yard.  It wasn’t there before, but it’s there now with a great big sign: “Welcome Neighborhood Kids – Please Play in Our Treehouse.”  What do you think? Strange perhaps?  Even a bit sinister (you’ve heard all those campfire stories)?  Definitely and most assuredly it’s creepy.

I first heard the term creepy treehouse a couple of years ago when I was facilitating a discovery session at a university.  For those of you not in Higher Education, it’s a term that apparently originated in 2008 and refers to social media sites built by universities and intended for use by students.  It has been suggested (and probably rightly so) that student adoption of many of these social media “solutions” is often low because students view them as creepy treehouses: something built by unknown adults to try to lure unsuspecting kids for possibly nefarious reasons.

There’s a bit of a creepy treehouse problem faced by most social media sites, not just ones in a university environment.  Consider those social networking sites sponsored and hosted by companies but intended for use by their client base (and prospective clients).  An immediate barrier to entry on the part of many first-time visitors is “Why should I engage in conversation with this company? Aren’t they just trying to get my contact information so they can try to sell me more stuff (or sell my name to some other company I’m not interested in)?” 

How does a company—looking to legitimately engage its client base for reasons other than simple marketing—overcome this “creepy treehouse” effect?  Perhaps the best way is to make a couple of things quite clear from the outset. 

First: What is the motivation of the visitor to participate?  Will they gain knowledge that they can’t gain anywhere else?  Will they be able to gain recognition from other visitors (or members) that participate in the site?  Will they be able to make better buying decisions?  Will they get coupons or discounts for participating?  Being upfront and obvious about the value proposition (sorry, I hate that term even though I feel obligated to use it) for the participant is important.  Value must be apparent not just from explicit statements on the site about potential rewards but also in the way the site works: it has to function in ways that obviously and immediately make visitors realize the value of their participation.   

Second and perhaps more importantly, the visitor must feel a strong measure of trust in the site.  Obvious settings and explanations that allow the visitor to control privacy settings, for instance, is one way to achieve trust.  Prominent methods and explanations of moderation rules should be available to assure visitors that their participation is both valued and protected. Having the ability for a visitor to send a message to an actual person and have a reasonable expectation of a meaningful response is also important.  Being able to see evidence that other visitors/member trust the site is also an important element.  As with perceived value, the trust elements of the site must be obvious.

There are, of course, many other elements besides value and trust to building a successful social networking site, and I’ll be blogging about some of them in future posts. For now, if you’re building or renovating a social media site, you may find it a valuable exercise to try to view your site as the creepy treehouse that first-time visitors are apt to see, and set in place elements to overcome that effect.  Otherwise you might find your beautiful new treehouse vandalized and spray painted with all manner of objectionable graffiti.  Or perhaps worse yet, it may sit empty and alone while visitors flock to other sites.