If you have read the book Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath (thanks for the tip, Healy) or similar prose, you will know the concept of the Curse of Knowledge. Once you know something, being able to imagine being ignorant of that knowledge is incredibly difficult (though the older I get, the easier it is to imagine a great void of general ignorance).
Here’s how you can test this. Go to your nearest bus stop and engage some nice commuters in conversation. Propose a lovely game – they’ll all want to play (success statistics pending). To play the game, you will think of a song and tap it out on the side of the bus stop with the big stick you’re carrying (the big stick may improve engagement scores, according to field studies). The commuters have to guess the song.
Simple.
But – it will be impossible for you to not hear the song in your head as you thwack away at the bus stop with your stick. The lovely (nervous) commuters however, are not privvy to this information and are likely to only hear a peculiar sequence of bangs.
Try not to be frustrated. Or to use the stick to further impress the song upon the lovely commuters (if you’ll excuse the pun).
This is the Curse of Knowledge.
Online – sharing, caring, liking, hating, posting, uploading, downloading, grouping blah blah – it’s become quite pervasive. We in the analytics industry are fascinated by the different ways of computing reach or attempting to figure out the ROI of a positive tweet. But we cannot put ourselves in the position of the user (Mr User, to you) because we know about the tools, the methods, the metrics, the connections and so on.
Mr User couldn’t care less! He has a Facebook account and sometimes he “likes” things, but he doesn’t necessarily make the connection when he “likes” an article on his favourite news aggregator. He doesn’t know if it’s a Facebook Like, a proprietary Like, a Disqus Like… He just likes the article and wants to show his appreciation. He doesn’t give a crap about where he uploads his photos as long as he can upload them and share them (even that dodgy one). He signs up to several different types of blog comment platforms but couldn’t tell you which ones, he’s just eager to comment on that post about the five-legged snake puppy.
Bear in mind that brand loyalty in social media is not as strong as conventional loyalty. Mr User is fickle only because there are so many brands striving to get his attention that it is just noise. He sees “Like” or a thumbs up or a plus or minus – he may think “like” because he got that term from FB but he doesn’t care if that’s what he’s using to like something.
On this post, feel free to “recommend” via Facebook or Like via Disqus or give a comment a thumbs-up. I will file it all under the “Yay me” column. When I have both, the usage is split across the two. When I have one, all the “Likes” are by the same method. Mr User doesn’t care which version you have, he just wants to like the article. He’s not thinking about whether or not this action will share the link with his (finger quotes) Friends.
So, scare some commuters if it’ll help, but remember that you can’t un-know things you know and you are seeing the landscape from a completely different viewpoint.
Mr User sees this:
You see this:
