As a freshmen in college I was good at a lot of things, interacting with women was not one of them. One story my friends are fond of retelling took place in the community laundry room. Since the first week of school I had found one particular hall mate quite attractive. I had no idea how to approach her and devised an awesome plan. I would give her a gift, and not just any gift, an entire box of cookies! This was a sizable chunk of my meal plan for the week. While she was doing her laundry, I practically ran into the room, deposited the box of cookies into her stunned hands and bolted out. I failed to notice one of my best friends in the corner and have never lived the tale down.
Have you ever found yourself pursuing a goal only to turn around and do the exact opposite of what’s required to achieve it?
Reading the book the Pursuit of Perfect, I just stumbled upon an interesting self reflection tool.
The author describes a pair of motivations that people try to satisfy. Self verification and self enhancement. Self enhancement pushes people to seek out feedback that they are great. Self verification drives people to seek out feedback that verifies their own self image. When your self image lines up with your goals, these motivations work in tandem to create success. When your self image and goals conflict, the result is unsatisfying erratic half steps and false starts. I desperately wanted this girl to like me, and at the time I knew I did not understand the first thing about attracting a woman.
The next time set my mind to a goal, I’ll take a moment to make sure it aligns with my self image. I might just save myself a box of cookies.
At this point you’d have to at least consider right?
Over a year ago Facebook launched a technology called Beacon. This allowed partner companies to send information to Facebook about their users if they had a Facebook cookie. Subsequently something would appear in the Facebook user’s news stream like Benjamin Berry has bought tickets to Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Then all my friends get a little post in their news feeds and an idea of my poor taste in movies.
The upshot for partner sites is they get some highly targeted advertising in my Facebook feed. Bad taste in movies is after all contagious. Facebook gets to finally make some money to go with that spectacular valuation they have. Only one party gets left out in the cold and that’s the user. The transaction implicitly acknowledges there is value in access to the network but does not reward the caretaker of the network. Facebook must acknowledge that these are endorsements and compensate the endorser.
I can imagine a few ways to complete the endorsement deal. Facebook could payout cash to endorsers directly in proportion with their reach and amount of promotion. A couple of sticking points here, one is how to calculate reach. Simply rewarding users for their friend count would promote (even more) gamesmanship in cultivating friends, probably lowering the quality of networks. The other problem is it may be a bit unseemly right now to cash in on schilling bad movies to your friends. I’m sure they would prefer to reward users with some kind of Facebook points that could be exchanged for goods, services, or cash. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t have much of a marketplace right now. The other direction to go with compensation is to use the partner sites. Again in proportion with reach one might receive a free movie poster, or movie ticket for every X titles promoted.
In addition to rewarding users Facebook must also give users control over what they choose to promote. The process must begin as an opt-in, not an opt-out. Users must be able to fine tune which information provided by partner sites is passed on to friends as endorsements. After all I don’t really want anyone to know how many times I’ve seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
Aaron, Adam and I are doing a little competitive trading on updown.com. Each 9th we will compare our % up/down from last month. Doing the best earns you $10 from each of the losers. At the end of 3 months we’ll do a cumulative comparison for $25 a piece. I will naturally win because I am more pretentious than those guys. The most pretentious guy usually wins, unless they lose, but then they get bailed out so no worries.
