My Take On Blyk – Or – Traps 4, 7, 9 And 10
A while ago I wrote about 11 traps that most commentators, companies and/or individuals fall into regularly.
You can read my suggested traps here. Or see below:
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1. Paralysis by analysis trap – discussion at the expense of action
2. The knowing-doing trap – failing to execute the decision despite knowing it needs to be done
3. The ignorance and complacency trap – resulting from a culture of blame, low responsibility, bad delegation and/or poor communication
4. The anchor trap – giving disproportionate weight to the first piece of information received, colouring the remaining data, regardless of its relative importance
5. The status quo trap – maintaining the current situation and not venturing out of our comfort zone
6. The sunk-cost trap – repeating past mistakes
7. The confirming evidence trap – seeking and biasing information to justify an existing decision and to discount opposing information
8. The over-confidence trap – overestimating the accuracy of forecasts
9. The framing trap – when a problem or situation is incorrectly stated
10. The recent event trap – giving undue weight to a recent event (similar to the anchor trap)
11. The prudence trap – being over-cautious and risk averse (similar to the status quo trap)
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This post is aimed at the commentators and the traps they tend to fall into:
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In recent times, many people ask me about Blyk.
They ask for my opinion, my view, my judgement or my prediction for the mobile network I helped create, and that has been under such intense scrutiny over a considerable period of time, often by people who are willing it to fail as it blows apart common thinking on what effective commercial communication is. Change is the arch-enemy of the competent.
So – mainly that I can now direct people to this post, rather than repeating stuff in email/SMS/verbally, here is my opinion, view, judgement or prediction. Delete as appropriate – my top 3 are:
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1. Blyk has fundamentally changed what commercial communication via mobile means. Forever. This isn’t a comment on ‘perfect-ness’ this is a comment on paradigm shifts. Different league. Yes, perhaps harder to comprehend. That doesn’t invalidate reality. Just check out Communities Dominate Brands book by Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore – the blog and book links of which are here
2. I strongly suggest that commentators separate an infrastructural business model from the market-beating engagement rates/advocacy scores found within Blyk’s permission, preference and profile approach. The advertisers saw return on investment like never before. People loved and trusted the service like never before. By doing so, the real ‘game-changer’ that Blyk is, will shine through – if it doesn’t (in some people’s minds) it will be down to personal bias and those that slam it will miss out on all the fun in the future. Really.
3. The model contains a myriad of complexity that is tremendously difficult to easily replicate and I urge those who look on, to, at least, consider that the mechanisms are more profound than obviously apparent.
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To summarize though, I refer back to my original 11 traps, originally published offline, many years before Blyk existed. The most common traps that commentators on Blyk fall into are: 4, 7, 9 and 10:
4. The anchor trap – giving disproportionate weight to the first piece of information received, colouring the remaining data, regardless of its relative importance
7. The confirming evidence trap – seeking and biasing information to justify an existing decision and to discount opposing information
9. The framing trap – when a problem or situation is incorrectly stated
10. The recent event trap – giving undue weight to a recent event (similar to the anchor trap)
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Interestingly, these 4 traps which many are falling into, cause (at least) traps 1, 2, 3, 5 and 11.
As I said a while ago, disruption quietly grows in the dust clouds of speculation.
Yes – models can improve – but I urge you not underestimate the effect that Blyk has had, and will have, on the communications industry.
Onward and upward.
Here here.