Facebook’s New Mobile Test Framework: How users navigate on mobile

Facebook lost its ability to “move fast and break things” when it switched its apps from HTML5 to native. But it’s gotten its mojo back. Today it announced a big iOS 7-style app redesign featuring bottom-screen “tab bar” navigation built with an advanced native mobile testing framework. Facebook knew to ditch the pull-out navigation drawer by testing different interfaces in 10 million-user batches.

[If you don't see the new Facebook app in the App Store, give it an hour as the rollout seems to be a bit slow]

The new version of Facebook for iOS isn’t just for iOS 7. It’s rolling out to iOS 5 and 6 too, but with a black tab bar for navigation at the bottom of the screen that matches the old iOS style instead of the white tab bar for iOS 7. However, the tab bar won’t be coming to Facebook for iPad, as it sees the drawer as still a good fit for bigger screens.

For the little ones, the new tab bar delivers a super-charged “More” button. It appears on the far right next to one-tap buttons for News Feed, Requests, Messages, and Notifications.

More reveals your app bookmarks just like the old drawer did, but will save your place in whatever product you browse. Previously, if you opened your drawer and switched to look at Events or Photos, you’d lose your place in the News Feed or whatever else you were doing. The new More button essentially opens tabs over the top of the feed so your state and context are preserved. It even works between sessions so if you leave Events open in More, your parties will be waiting there at the ready any time you tap More.

As for aesthetics, Facebook has also made the top title bar translucent and redesigned many of its icons like the one for messages to match the line and arc style of Apple’s new mobile operating system. But Facebook didn’t flatten everything, leaving some texture and depth to the feed. You can see video of the redesigned app here.

The real story today isn’t the app, though, but how it was made.

HTML5 WAS SLOW, BUT BOY COULD IT TEST

Facebook has never been afraid to try new things and see what sticks. It invented the “Gatekeeper” system to let it simultaneously test thousands of variations of Facebook on the web with subsets of users. It would collect data about usage and performance to inform what to roll out to everyone.

On mobile, it hoped to do the same thing, so it built its iOS and Android apps using a Frankenstein combination of native architecture and HTML5. The latter let it ship code changes and tests to users on the fly without the need for a formal app update. “With HTML5 we’d ship code every single day and be able to switch it on server-side”, Facebook product manager Michael Sharon tells me. That meant it could push a News Feed redesign one day to 5% of users, then to everyone a week later, and then fix a bug a few days after that.

But beyond testing, HTML5 was a disaster. It made Facebook’s apps sluggish and unresponsive, which hampered engagement, ad views, and their app store ratings. Users hated Slowbook. Mark Zuckerberg would later say on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that “Our biggest mistake as a company…was betting too much on HTML5″.

So Facebook ditched HTML5 and rebuilt the apps entirely on native infrastructure last Summer. They were twice as fast. Suddenly their app store ratings shot up, and people read twice as many News Feed stories on average. It was a huge win for Facebook.

Except that it had to sacrifice HTML5′s testing abilities.

“WE USE TESTING KIND OF RELIGIOUSLY”

Sharon explains “One thing we lost was the ability to do testing. We use testing kind of religiously in both the web and HTML5 apps, and this is something we wanted to get back to as much as possible.”

Having to wait until its monthly app update cycle came around to test new versions of its apps was torture for the typically nimble company. It wanted to push changes and get immediate feedback. To solve the problem on Android, Facebook launched a beta tester club in June 2013 that let it use Android’s more permissive stance towards developers to let power users sign up to play with potential new features and catch bugs.

But iOS refuses to sully its simplicity with such beta capabilities. So over the past year Facebook quietly built out a new native mobile app testing framework and sprung it into action in March to build the app update released today.

How it works is that when you download Facebook for iOS, the app actually contains multiple different versions of the interface. However, you’re grouped with a few hundred thousand other users and you all only see one version of the app. This way Facebook can try out tons of variations all at once, without multiple app updates or any confusion for users. We’ve all been Guinea pigs in the mobile testing framework since March, but none of us knew it.

Sharon was adamant that these different tests aren’t half-baked betas, saying “We’re not shipping a subpar version of our app. We’re shipping full production-ready versions that could become the main experience”. When added up, Facebook would test major changes with between five and ten million users at a time — more than many apps have in total.

“I wouldn’t say we’re ‘data-driven’. We’re ‘data-aware’ or ‘data-informed’,” Sharon says. That means that while Facebook collects a bunch of testing data that sways its decisions, it won’t chuck out its intuition or a design it believes in just because the data says so.

The first big mission of the new testing framework was rethinking how users navigate on mobile. It wondered if there was something better than the navigation drawer that slides out from the side of the app.

It used the new testing framework to experiment with dozens of different interface designs, and compared them on metrics including “engagement metrics, satisfaction metrics, revenue metrics, speed metrics, perception of speed metrics” until it found that when looked at holistically, the row of buttons at the bottom of the feed or main screen was the best design. This is what’s becoming available for iOS today.

And that’s how Facebook got its testing groove back.

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker,

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says:

“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”

Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

After all, the visual sense is the strongest developed one in most human beings. It’s only natural that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by color alone.

So how do colors really affect us and what is the science of colors in marketing really? As we are also trying to make lots of improvements to our product at Buffer, this was a key part to learn more about. Let’s dig into some of the latest, most interesting research on it.




First: Can you recognize the online brands just based on color?
Before we dive into the research, here are some awesome experiments that show you how powerful color alone really is. Based on just the colors of the buttons, can you guess which company belongs to each of them:

Example 1 (easy):



Example 2 (easy):



Example 3 (medium):



Example 4 (hard):





These awesome examples from Youtube designer Marc Hemeon, I think show the real power of colors more than any study could.

How many were you able to guess? (All the answers are at the bottom of this post!)



Which colors trigger which feeling for us?
Being completely conscious about what color triggers us to think in which way isn’t always obvious. The Logo Company has come up with an amazing breakdown which colors are best for which companies and why. Here are 4 great examples:

Black:



Green:



Blue:



Especially if we also take a look at what the major brands out there are using, a lot of their color choices become a lot more obvious. Clearly, everyone of these companies is seeking to trigger a very specific emtion:





On top of that, especially when we want to buy something, the colors can play a major role. Analytics company KISSmetrics created an amazing infographic on the science of how colors affect our purchases.

Especially the role of “Green” stands out to me as the most relaxing color we can use to make buying easier. We didn’t intentionally choose this as the main color for Buffer actually, it seems to have worked very well so far though.

At second look, I also realized how frequently black is used for luxury products. It’s of course always obvious in hindsight. Here is the full infographic:





How to improve your marketing with better use of colors:
This all might be fairly entertaining, but what are some actual things we can apply today to our website or app? The answer comes yet again from some great research done by the good folks over at KISSmetrics.

If you are building an app that mainly targets Women, here is KISSmetrics best advice for you:

Women love: Blue, Purple and Green
Women hate: Orange, Brown and Gray


In case your app is strictly targeting men, the rules of the game are slightly different. Here it goes:

Men love: Blue, Green and Black
Men hate: Brown, Orange and Purple




In another amazing experiment Performable (now HubSpot) wanted to find out whether simply changing the color of a button would make a difference to conversion rates.

They started out with the simple hypothesis of choosing between 2 colors (green and red) and trying guess what would happen.

For green, their intuition was this:

“Green connotes ideas like “natural” and “environment,” and given its wide use in traffic lights, suggests the idea of “Go” or forward movement.”

For red, their thinking went like this:

“The color red, on the other hand, is often thought to communicate excitement, passion, blood, and warning. It is also used as the color for stopping at traffic lights. Red is also known to be eye-catching.”

So, clearly an A/B test between green and red would result in green, the more friendly color to win. At least that was their guess. Here is how their experiment looked like:



So how did that experiment turn out? The answer was more surprising than I had expected:

The red button outperformed the green button by 21%

What’s most important to consider is that nothing else was changed at all:

21% more people clicked on the red button than on the green button. Everything else on the pages was the same, so it was only the button color that made this difference.

This definitely made me wonder. If we were to read all the research before this experiment and ask every researcher which version they would guess would perform better, I’m sure green would be the answer in nearly all cases. Not so much.

At my company Buffer, we’ve also conducted dozens of experiments to improve our conversion rates through changes of colors. Whilst the results weren’t as clear, we still saw a huge change. One hypothesis is that for a social media sharing tool, there is less of a barrier to signup, which makes the differences less significant.

Despite all the studies, generalizations are extremely hard to make. Whatever change you make, treat it first as a hypothesis, and see an the actual experiment what works for you. Personally, I’m always very prone to go with opinion based on what I read or research I’ve come across. Yet, data always beats opinion, no matter what.

Quick last fact: Why are hyperlinks blue?
This is something that always interested me and is actually a fun story. It’s to give the best contrast between blue and the original grey of websites:



Here is the full explanation:

“Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the web, is believed to be the man who first made hyperlinks blue. Mosaic, a very early web browser, displayed webpages with a (ugly) gray background and black text. The darkest color available at the time that was not the same as the black text was that blue color. Therefore, to make links stand apart from plain text, but still be readable, the color blue was selected.”

I think it is extremely fascinating that simply changing something as small as the color, can completely chance the outcome of something. What have been your findings in terms of colors and marketing? I’d love your ideas on this.

10 Screw ups you can Avoid in your Advertising Career

I have a friend who’d been working in China for a long time. He said that after a week of being there you feel like you can write a book about China. After a year, you could manage an essay.

After ten years of living in China, you would probably end up with a postcard.

Advertising is a bit like China in that way. After almost 20 years of doing it, I feel I can barely squeeze out a few core themes that would fit on the back of a postcard. Maybe after another 10, I could write one on the back of a business card.

I got into advertising because it was my Plan B. When I was in high school, I read a novel which was set in an ad agency. I knew the author had actually worked in advertising before, so I presumed that some of it was based on real experience. In the story, I got the feeling, that advertising would be a place where you could earn a decent living, without any formal qualifications.

You’d only need your ability to think creatively.

From that point on, I parked a career as an advertising copywriter as an escape hatch - an industry to go to if my plan A bombed out.

Plan A did in fact flame-out in spectacular fashion. Towards the end of my 19th year in this world, I found myself trying to sell the most awful copy test (a set of lateral thinking problems agencies used to test a person’s ability to approach advertising briefs) to Johannesburg’s advertising industry. Of course I thought I was a genius and I couldn’t understand why nobody was clambering to hire me. That’s when I learned my first lesson:

1: You’re not as good as you sometimes think you are.

Imagine that. I was learning, and I hadn’t even got in yet.

A very kind headhunter took pity on me and tried to find me a gig. I held on to a belief deep inside me, that I did have what it takes, but I just needed the right environment to prove myself. Of course, I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was right. Talent is nothing without the right environment - the right coaching and the right inspiration. Because you know -

2: Success never happens in a vacuum.

Lesson 2, done and dusted and I haven’t even earned a single dime yet. I told the headhunter I would work in an agency - FREE! As long as I could get exposure to the right people and opportunities. Of course, I was too young and inexperienced to understand that I was asking for a full-time internship but when he called me to say that Saatchi & Saatchi would take me on - that is what I was offered.

I started working my first job in advertising in March of 1995. It wasn’t a perfect agency - by no means. But it did contain some amazing people. People of the kind I have never met before. And it contained amazing opportunities. Lucky for me, one of those opportunities did arrive on my desk and lucky for me I solved a problem that had been lingering in that agency for a long time. The client loved it, and so the agency felt compelled to put me on the payroll.

At the time, the agency had a horrible but rather profitable project - to advertise the 1995 local government elections. But two wonderful opportunities were hidden inside the darkness. Firstly, between me an one of the senior writers we produced close to 300 radio commercials. For a young copywriter with mere months of experience under the belt, to get this exposure to the production process, was incredible. It gave me a grounding in radio that stays with me today. And secondly, I wrote an ad for that project that gave me an in into the best agency in South Africa.

And so, I learned Lesson 3.

3: Never say no to an awful brief.

Part of my duties were to write the Afrikaans communication for the campaign. Because very few people on the project understood (or cared for) the language, I was able to be a little experimental. I had a lot of fun with some of the ads. There was one press ad I was particularly proud of, but of course you had to understand the language and its history to appreciate it. Lucky for me, one person in particular saw it and loved it.

Harry Kalmer, the playwright, novelist and famed Afrikaans copywriter at TBWA Hunt Lascaris saw it in the paper and when he decided that it was time for him to pursue his own interests, he suggested to John Hunt that they should hire me.

So, after two years in the business, I got hired into one of the best advertising agencies in the world - with a not great portfolio, but on the strength of one newspaper ad.

Being the Afrikaans copywriter wasn’t the perfect job, but - it was a job in the right agency. Hunt Lascaris was in full ascendence and it has created an amazing environment that allowed for charming, memorable and award-winning work to flourish. And I was fully exposed to it. To the people, the culture and the work.

I realised I could apply my mind to any brief there - not just the ones I had been assigned to. And I did. At some point, the agency realised I had useful ideas and they had paired me up with one of their most up and coming art directors. We stayed a team for a few months and then I was placed in a new team and did the best work of my life.

4: Your career is like a highway. Choose your on-ramps and lane changes carefully.

This is a very good analogy for a career in advertising. Probably also for a career in anything. If I didn’t get into the lane that got me into Hunt Lascaris I would never have come as far as I did.

Remember lesson 1: the environment is incredibly important. Great talent will wilt and suffer in the wrong environment. Don’t compromise on who you choose to shape your talent.

I made some bad lane changes after I left there, but lucky for me the momentum of my stay there helped me to get back in the fast lane. In fact, after two years I found myself back at Hunt Lascaris.

I noticed a shift in the culture of the agency. At that time, John Hunt, one of the the founders and the eventual world-wide creative director of TBWA, asked me if I had noticed a difference. I said: Sure. Two years ago, creative teams always had their doors open. People would drift in and out and look at your work and they would always comment, and help you make your work better.

In the new culture the doors were always closed. Teams worked in isolation. People protected their ideas.

John just nodded and I left to go home.

The next morning, when I arrived at work - every single door in the creative department had been removed overnight. Firstly, that was the type of decisive action that is the hallmark of a great leader, but secondly, it was opening up the agency again to the power of collaborative learning.

John understood that ideas are almost never a single individual’s “work”. They are the result of days, months, even years of influence. Half-formed thoughts bouncing around in the ether until one day, when the conditions are perfect, they snap together in a beautiful, full formed idea.

He even alluded to this with an analogy that I only fully grokked years later. He said, as creative people, we carry a bag of Lego with us. And every experience we have is a block of Lego that goes into the bag. And as we tread this earth, and as we live, the Lego pieces bounce around our bags and sometimes snaps together in new and wonderful combinations. The trick, if you follow his analogy, was to fill your bag with as many Lego pieces as you can to maximise the opportunity for as many new ideas to form in your head as possible. This brings us to the next lesson:

5: Live your creative job outside the agency.

Open yourself up to lots of different and new experiences. When people start out in advertising, there is a huge temptation to try and fit in with the other creatives. With the rest of the culture. But if you do that, your work will look and feel like everyone else’s. You know that joke about teenagers - “I want to be different - just like my friends”? Well, ad people are like that too. It is the truly innovative people in our business that manage to speak with their own voice. They don’t care about trends. They listen to that vibration deep inside their own hearts. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist had something to say about this in his great essay “Self-Reliance”:

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

What Emerson was trying to say to us is this: that weird way of looking at a problem, if you don’t act upon it, you will see that on next year’s Cannes reel. And you will hate yourself because somebody else will pick up your accolade.

This means you have to be brave. And you have to understand this about advertising. It is a business of opinions. There is no real right and wrong. What is true is this: the one with the best ability to convey her opinion wins. So. Learn to make your case. If you’re shy, and an introvert, it doesn’t matter. Just learn to make your ideas hear and learn to present them with the passion and theatre. Be true to yourself, believe in your ideas and respect them and give them a big opportunity to win. It is hard to boil down what I have just said in one lesson, but let me try:

6: Give your ideas maximum respect.

Use massive pieces of paper to let illustrate your thought. Be confident. Have balls. Present in a way that you are comfortable with, but by all means, present with passion.

In that time, when I was at Hunt Lascaris, I got given an assignment that was my first real creative leadership role. A perfect opportunity to give a young player a run on the park when the match result is a foregone conclusion. The project was sure to fail for many reasons, but it was a brilliant opportunity for them to try things out.

The opportunity was this: BMW was about to launch the newly redesigned MINI car. They asked us to pitch, because we were the agency of record for the BMW brand, but all signs pointed to the fact that they wanted a new agency to handle this launch.

But we had three months and I did nothing except work on this. Plus, I got to collaborate with amazing people.

What I learned from this was that if you can make everyone in your team believe that you can achieve the impossible - you will. Also, if you have an idea that really excites people. That really touches them, then you will win.

And we had such an idea. It was so simple. John Hunt kept saying to us during reviews: “This car is such a legend, it defies description. So … our idea was this: for the indescribable car, we invent its own language.

Minish - was a language we made up and presented as the launch idea. We developed about 200 words that described how you feel about your MINI, from the way your bum feels when the seats warm them, to the sound it made when you wire the battery terminals the wrong way round.

It was the kind of idea that lit a fire in people ran. Our activation guys came up with an amazing dealer strategy. They made CDs that people listened to on test-drives - that would be an instruction course on how to speak Minish.

We won that business. But in the end, they launched the car with an international campaign.

But, lesson learned:

7: Truly inspirational ideas can make the impossible happen.

This project lead to me being offered a job as Hunt Lascaris’ creative director in Cape Town.

I arrived at an agency that had the same name as the one I knew in Johannesburg, but that had a very different culture. I tried everything to do things the way I was thought but was too inexperienced to change the fundamentals that made the bigger sister agency tick. I also pushed work on clients who weren’t interested in that style of work. It was then that I learned that:

8: You can only do the work for your clients that they want you to do.

If you come up with awesome stuff for a client who does not think it is awesome it will fail in the long run. Spend time understanding a client’s business. Listen to them. Agency people like to believe their clients are idiots, but in most cases they know their brands. Work with them, not against them. Of course they want work that will make them famous, exactly what you want, but you have to tick their boxes. That is just the way advertising is. You can’t work around it. And you can’t blame the system. This is what you signed up for. So suck it up, love it, and make it work.

In the last few years, I have been lucky to have regional and global jobs in Asia and Europe. And I found this:

9: Before you change agencies, change yourself.

I am not saying don’t move if you’re unhappy. But I am saying give every job your best shot. Sometimes we are not honest with ourselves. We come up with reasons to leave - but actually those are just hiding our own insecurities. Give every position your best shot, and unless something really intolerable is going down, give it your best shot for at least 2 or 3 years.

Finally, I’d like to say a thing or two about your brain.

10: Your brain is your tool. Look after it.

You have chosen a job that 100% relies on the proper functioning of the matter between your ears. This means, if you take your job seriously, you should take proper care of your brain.

So:

No drugs. I am being serious. I have seen amazingly talented people lose their careers and their lives because their addiction to drugs took control of their lives. So, yeah, like your mom I am saying - say no to drugs. She says it cause she loves you, I am saying so cause I want you to make an awesome contribution to our industry.

Respect the computer. Computers are amazing tools. They have automated many functions you kids take for granted. When I was your age, we walked 16 miles in the snow - barefoot - to the agency. And we used letraset. And typewriters. Well, almost. But the point is this: computers can make your brain lazy. Use them when you execute, but always do all your thinking in your brain.

There is a theory that writers write better on typewriters because you can’t just backspace backspace backspace backspace. They spend more time composing in their heads so when they commit to paper, the words are better. The same is true for film cameras. Because film is expensive, you think more about the composition of a shot. If you’re just going to shoot 2000 images and choose one, where is the fun in that?

Computers are incredible tools. But like any powerful tool, it can cause you to lose a thumb. Or a brain. So get to know how to use them.

Successful People are Able to Pick Themselves Up ?

Success comes in all shapes and colours. You can be successful in your job and career but you can equally be successful in your marriage, at sports or a hobby. Whatever success you are after there is one thing all radically successful people have in common: Their ferocious drive and hunger for success makes them never give up.

Successful people (or the people talking or writing about them) often paint a picture of the perfect ascent to success. In fact, some of the most successful people in business, entertainment and sport have failed. Many have failed numerous times but they have never given up. Successful people are able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on trying.

I have collected some examples that should be an inspiration to anyone who aspires to be successful. They show that if you want to succeed you should expect failure along the way. I actually believe that failure can spur you on and make you try even harder. You could argue that every experience of failure increases the hunger for success. The truly successful won't be beaten, they take responsibility for failure, learn from it and start all over from a stronger position.

Let's look at some examples, including some of my fellow LinkedIn influencers:

Henry Ford - the pioneer of modern business entrepreneurs and the founder of the Ford Motor Company failed a number of times on his route to success. His first venture to build a motor car got dissolved a year and a half after it was started because the stockholders lost confidence in Henry Ford. Ford was able to gather enough capital to start again but a year later pressure from the financiers forced him out of the company again. Despite the fact that the entire motor industry had lost faith in him he managed to find another investor to start the Ford Motor Company - and the rest is history.

Walt Disney - one of the greatest business leaders who created the global Disney empire of film studios, theme parks and consumer products didn't start off successful. Before the great success came a number of failures. Believe it or not, Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was not creative enough! In 1922 he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram. The Kansas based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films. In 1923, the business went bankrupt. Walt didn't give up, he packed up, went to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company.

Richard Branson - He is undoubtedly a successful entrepreneur with many successful ventures to his name including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Music and Virgin Active. However, when he was 16 he dropped out of school to start a student magazine that didn't do as well as he hoped. He then set up a mail-order record business which did so well that he opened his own record shop called Virgin. Along the way to success came many other failed ventures including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vie, Virgin cards, etc.

Oprah Winfrey - who ranks No 1 in the Forbes celebrity list and is recognised as the queen of entertainment based on an amazing career as iconic talk show host, media proprietor, actress and producer. In her earlier career she had numerous set-backs, which included getting fired from her job as a reporter because she was 'unfit for television', getting fired as co-anchor for the 6 O'clock weekday news on WJZ-TV and being demoted to morning TV.

J.K. Rowling - who wrote the Harry Potter books selling over 400 million copies and making it one of the most successful and lucrative book and film series ever. However, like so many writers she received endless rejections from publishers. Many rejected her manuscript outright for reasons like 'it was far too long for a children's book' or because 'children books never make any money'. J.K. Rowling's story is even more inspiring because when she started she was a divorced single mum on welfare.

Bill Gates -co-founder and chairman of Microsoft dropped out of Harvard and set up a business called Traf-O-Data. The partnership between him, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert was based on a good idea (to read data from roadway traffic counters and create automated reports on traffic flows) but a flawed business model that left the company with few customers. The company ran up losses between 1974 and 1980 before it was closed. However, Bill Gates and Paul Allen took what they learned and avoided those mistakes whey they created the Microsoft empire.

History is littered with many more similar examples:

Milton Hershey failed in his first two attempts to set up a confectionary business.
H.J. Heinz set up a company that produced horseradish, which went bankrupt shortly after.
Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, the company he founded. Only to return a few years later to turn it into one of the most successful companies ever.
So, the one thing successful people never do is: Give up! I hope that this is inspiration and motivation for everyone who aspires to be successful in whatever way they chose. Do you agree or disagree with me? Are there other things you would add to the list of things successful people never do? Please share your thoughts...

Raise Your Salary; Improve your value to your employer

The only way you can command a higher salary is to make your employer more money than anyone else who could do your job.

You make money for your employer by producing profitable goods that will be bought by his customers (who are also his employers).

This is why your employer is not your employer, but your employer’s employers.

Who’s Your Employer?

As the saying goes in B2B (“business-to-business”) industries: “Your customer is not your customer but your customer’s customer.” To be successful in selling your products or services to your customer, you need to make your customer successful in selling his products or services to his customer.

As the manager of “ME, Incorporated,” you are in the B2B space. Your customer is your employer. If he doesn’t buy your services, you are out of a job. Your employer’s employers are his customers. If they don’t buy his products, he is out of business... And so are you.

Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

You buy a product if and only if you prefer it to any other use to which you could put your money. The seller sells her product if and only if she prefers the money to any other use to which she could put her product.

For example, if you buy a computer for $1,000, then you must believe that you will derive a higher benefit from the computer than from the $1,000. Similarly, if I sell you a computer for $1,000, I must believe that I will derive a higher benefit from the $1,000 than from the computer.

One of the greatest revolutions in economics was the discovery that “value” is not an attribute of things per se but, rather, an assessment made by the person for whom the thing appears to be valuable. Beginning with Aristotle, economists believed that “value” was an objective quality such as size, weight, or material composition. This thinking culminated with Karl Marx, who argued that “the labor incorporated in the good” was what made it valuable[CC1] .

They were all wrong.

A computer might be valuable to you because you don’t have one, but worthless to me because I have two. Neither of us is “wrong,” because the computer does not have an intrinsic value; it only has value for a particular person at a particular time under particular conditions. No matter how much effort the producer of the computer put into it, it’s still worthless to me.

The next time someone pleads with you, “But I worked so hard on this!” remember that the labor theory of value is hogwash. If his product doesn’t help you achieve your goals, all his effort has been for naught.

By the same logic, remember that your effort means nothing to your employer unless it helps him achieve his goals.

What Makes You Valuable?

You are selling your labor to your employer. (By “labor” I don’t just mean physical activity, but also everything else you do to contribute to your employer’s goals.)

Your employer buys your labor if and only if he prefers it to anything else he could do with his money—and that includes the labor of any other potential employee.

Your value to your employer depends solely on his ability to derive extra gains from your labor. (By “extra gains” I don’t just mean monetary profits but also everything else that matters to him and his organization.)

Of course, he combines your labor with other factors of production, such as the labor of others, capital equipment, and natural resources, so it is not a simple matter to calculate your contribution to the mix. But even if it is only an approximation, your employer will be willing to pay you only up to the monetary value that your contribution has for him.

A rational employer, one that wants to stay in business rather than overpay you and be undercut by more rational competitors who will bear lower costs, will never pay you more than this; and he will prefer to pay you less.

How much less? Well, how much would you like to pay for a computer? I wouldn’t mind getting it for free; would you? Well, neither would your employer mind getting your labor for free. The less cost, the more profit!

What Makes You Payable?

The upshot of all of this is that being “valuable” does not mean you are “payable.” As I said in my last post, your ability to negotiate your compensation is not limited only by the value of your labor in terms of extra gains for your employer. It is also limited by your employer’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement with you (his BATNA).

Your employer’s alternative is to hire the next most valuable person, where “value” is the difference between the extra gains he could make by hiring her minus her compensation.

So for your employer to hire you and keep you employed, your compensation must be in line with that of anyone else who could do as good a job for him as you can.

This is why the only way you can command a better salary is for you to be more valuable to your employer than anyone else who could do your job. And therefore, the only way to raise your salary is to make a higher contribution to your employer than you are making now.

This means helping him serve his customers more profitably than he currently does.

"In the market society the proprietors of [businesses, but also of labor] can enjoy their property only by employing it to the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage […] Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers.” —Ludwig Von Mises

Readers: What have you done at different stages of your career to improve your value to your employer, thereby raising your compensation? Leave a comment below and perhaps you will help thousands of professionals that would like to increase their value and command a higher salary.

Harness your productivity by taking note of these eight things

Forget about your job title or profession – everyone is looking for ways to be more productive at work. It’s time to set down your gallon-sized container of coffee, toss out your three-page to-do list, and put an end to those ridiculously long emails you’ve been sending.

Experiencing a highly productive workday can feel euphoric. But contrary to popular belief, simply checking tasks off your to-do list isn’t really an indication of productivity. Truly productive people aren’t focused on doing more things; this is actually the opposite of productivity. If you really want to be productive, you’ve got to make a point to do fewer things.

Recently I spoke with project management and productivity genius Tony Wong to find out the secret to a more productive workday. He provided me with some excellent insight into what he and other like-minded productive individuals do during their work week.

Harness your productivity by taking note of these eight things:

1. Create a smaller to-do list. Getting things accomplished during your workday shouldn’t be about doing as much as possible in the sanctioned eight hours. It may be hard to swallow, but there’s nothing productive about piling together a slew of tasks in the form of a checklist. Take a less-is-more approach to your to-do list by only focusing on accomplishing things that matter.

2. Take breaks. You know that ache that fills your brain when you’ve been powering through tasks for several hours? This is due to your brain using up glucose. Too many people mistake this for a good feeling, rather than a signal to take a break. Go take a walk, grab something to eat, workout, or meditate – give your brain some resting time. Achieve more productivity during your workday by making a point to regularly clear your head. You’ll come back recharged and ready to achieve greater efficiency.

3. Follow the 80/20 rule. Did you know that only 20 percent of what you do each day produces 80 percent of your results? Eliminate the things that don’t matter during your workday: they have a minimal effect on your overall productivity. For example, on a project, systematically remove tasks until you end up with the 20 percent that gets the 80 percent of results.

4. Start your day by focusing on yourself. If you begin your morning by checking your email, it allows others to dictate what you accomplish. Set yourself in the right direction by ignoring your emails and taking the morning to focus on yourself, eat a good breakfast, meditate, or read the news.

5. Take on harder tasks earlier in the day. Knock out your most challenging work when your brain is most fresh. Save your busy work – if you have any – for when your afternoon slump rolls in.

6. Pick up the phone. The digital world has created poor communication habits. Email is a productivity killer and usually a distraction from tasks that actually matter. For example, people often copy multiple people on emails to get it off their plate – don't be a victim of this action. This distracts everyone else by creating noise against the tasks they’re trying to accomplish and is a sign of laziness. If you receive an email where many people are CC'd, do everyone a favor by BCCing them on your reply. If your email chain goes beyond two replies, it’s time to pick up the phone. Increase your productivity by scheduling a call.

7. Create a system. If you know certain things are ruining your daily productivity, create a system for managing them. Do you check your emails throughout the day? Plan a morning, afternoon, and evening time slot for managing your email. Otherwise, you’ll get distracted from accomplishing more important goals throughout the day.

8. Don’t confuse productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity. In fact, a number of time-saving methods – take meetings and emails for example – are actually just ways to get out of doing real work. Place your focus on doing the things that matter most as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Remember, less is more when it comes to being productive during the workday.

There hasn't been a single accident under computer control:Google's introducing driver less cars

Google's self-driving cars are on the up and up. Google revealed today that its dozen of self-driving cars have collectively driven over 300,000 miles without any accidents, paving the way the towards a safer future on the road.

Posted on Google's Official Blog:

They've covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn't been a single accident under computer control.

We're encouraged by this progress, but there's still a long road ahead. To provide the best experience we can, we'll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter.

To help further Google's advancements and test new terrain is the addition of the Lexus RX450h SUV. Google says ultimately, it wants these self-driving cars to allow us to be more productive in our cars. Sounds like a sketchy way of saying "we want you to work in your car during your commute." Oh god! With Nevada being the only state that has approved self-driving cars on limited roads, there really is a very long way to go before we can sit back and cruise while we're chauffeured around. Baby steps, baby steps...

We filter through a ton of futuristic technologies every day here at DVICE, but one advancement that keeps getting overlooked is the self-driving car by Google. When can we let our cars take the wheel, KITT-style? Google's chairman Eric Schmidt, thinks driving cars will be the norm in our lifetime. Speaking at Allen and Co.'s Sun Valley conference, Schmidt let it slip that Google had discussed its self-driving car plans with all major auto-makers. "Self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime, said Schmidt. Citing challenges in getting state approvals — Nevada being the only one to approve of the autonomous car — Schmidt said that "The current biggest problem is that it runs at the speed limit and nobody drives at the speed limit."

Google's test raced its self-driving cars against human-driven cars and the self-driven ones would win. He further elaborated that getting to a destination in a self-driving car would be as simple as inputting an address into the car's internal maps navigation system and letting the car drive you via the quickest route.Naturally, concerns about the car turning against the passenger were raised and Schmidt reassured everybody that "The deal here is that there's a person in the driver's seat, and a really big red button that says 'Off.'" Self-driving cars wouldn't be just a boon for the lazy, but it'd also save lives. Schmidt believes that the faster we get self-driving cars, the more lives we'll save from car accidents.

What do you think? Will we really have self-driving cars in our lifetime? Remember, back in the 1950s, people were saying flying cars would become the norm in their lifetime, and look how that didn't happen.

See the world, think Terminator

One of the most recognizable visual tropes of science fiction is Terminator vision, a red-tinted, data overlay view that is meant to illustrate what the killer robot is seeing as its hunts its human prey. Now one of Silicon Valley's leading techies has posted what could be considered the visual equivalent for Google's much talked about self-driving cars.   

Gross, the long-time head of technology incubator Idealab, the organization behind a wide range of tech companies, posted the visual to his Twitter account earlier today. Accompanying the visual, Gross wrote, "Google's Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1GB per SECOND. Here's what it 'sees' making a left turn…" 

Gross doesn't explain where this recent visual comes from, but in the video below you can see an animated version of the graphic via a presentation made a couple of years ago by Chris Urmson, one of the project's early developers. As expected, Google's self-driving cars use a ton of sensors including lasers and radars to carefully react to pedestrians and streets accurately and safely.

*Google's self-driving cars (via wiki)

The Google driverless car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for driverless cars. The project is currently being led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.

The U.S. state of Nevada passed a law on June 29, 2011 permitting the operation of driverless cars in Nevada. Google had been lobbying for driverless car laws. The Nevada law went into effect on March 1, 2012, and the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles issued the first license for a self-driven car in May 2012. The license was issued to a Toyota Prius modified with Google's experimental driverless technology.As of April 2012, Florida became the second state to allow the testing of driverless cars on public roads. California became the third state to legalize the use of self-driven cars for testing purposes as of September 2012 when Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law at Google HQ in Mountain View.

Five biggest disintermediation challenges now facing agencies

Agencies love “Mad Men.” One reason: It shows when they were at the zenith of their standing with clients. That’s slowly gone away, along with the culture of drinking copiously during the day.

Agencies are in a perilous position. As Digiday’s Confession series has shown, this is a known fact. At the root of all this is the tendency of agencies to cede power — to brands, to tech platforms, even to publishers. Digiday spoke with several sources on all sides of digital media — agency, brand, publisher, platform — to determine the five biggest disintermediation challenges now facing agencies.

Service-driven content creators
BuzzFeed, Yahoo and Vice all have one thing in common: They provide creative services for brands who advertise on their platforms. Think of Virgin Mobile’s partnership with BuzzFeed. Thursdays, Virgin meets at BuzzFeed’s office, where an editorial meeting takes place for about 90 minutes. The teams collaborate around story ideas and go over the numbers of the previous week’s performance. Based on that, plans are set for the following week’s publishing schedule. With services like these, by a publisher, there’s not really a need for the agency.

“Our brand strategy is to stay one step ahead or alongside the Virgin fan,” said Ron Faris, head of brand marketing at Virgin Mobile. “What’s unique is we had our own staff of writers that put the content together. Working with BuzzFeed was like having an always-on, 24-7 newsroom.”

Getting closer to startups
Startup incubator programs like Mondelez’s Mobile Futures program and the PepsiCo10 program are good examples of how brands are cozying up to startups. Whereas agencies traditionally were the liaison between brands and their ad tech providers, brands are now looking to take out the middle man for direct relationships.

The brand center of excellence is another example how brands are forging close ties with ad tech and startups. Companies like PepsiCo, Kraft, Nestle Purina, GE and MasterCard have these units set up within the organization to evaluate platforms, devices and channels. These teams’ sole purpose is to filter out all the noise of ad tech and figure out what the opportunities are for their respected brands. That’s made them a key constituency to getting in with the world’s largest marketers.

Moving marketing disciplines in-house
Brands have recently been taking their social media management in-house: Nike, Campbell Soup, MasterCard and others are realizing that they don’t need agencies for the day-to-day stuff, claiming a truly “authentic” relationship is only possible if the brand handles the dialogue with consumers.

According to Carmen D’Ascendis, director of global marketing at Jack Daniel’s, the brand’s Facebook and social media engagement scores are up since the whiskey maker formed an in-house social media team. That’s not to say that Jack Daniel’s does not use agencies. Jack Daniel’s in-house social team does the day-to-day stuff while its agencies help with strategy and campaigns.

“Some companies outsource, and then they have 23-year-old digital natives tweeting and texting and such on their behalf,” D’Ascendis said. “To me, that seems not the most effective way to engage with your consumer. The reason is, it’s unclear if they understand your brand enough. I don’t believe you have to be a digital native to get digital. How does Fisher Price figure out toys? They don’t have kids doing their marketing, that’s for sure.”

The same is happening on the media-buying side. It never made sense for most marketers to do media buying in-house. But the rise of programmatic ad buying means instead of needing a 100 media buyers, only four sharp analytics-minded people are needed to use automated ad platforms. At that point, it makes sense to do more in-house.

“A lot of brands are finding that working with a centralized trading desk isn’t really worth it. With all this money going to Facebook and publishers and technology companies giving brands alternatives, agencies certainly are being squeezed from all sides,” said a publisher who asked to remain anonymous. “If you are a smart-enough brand, you realize you could use programmatic buying, and the service providers are [providing] marketing services. These and other technology companies are becoming the new agencies. The agencies aren’t really bringing anything new to the table, so when a brand is looking to decrease their spend, guess what they’ll be doing.”

Recruiting data scientists
Target’s data scientists helped the retailer target ads at women in their second trimester of pregnancy. This is a time when expecting mothers begin to buy things like vitamins and maternity clothing, things Target sells. By identifying women in their second trimester, specifically, Target thought it could then make these women customers for years because once they started buying diapers at their nearest Target, they’d start buying paper towels, cereal and soda there as well. Data and analytics are things a lot of brands lean on their agencies for. But big brands are realizing that sifting through all the data the Internet produces is a full-time job, and it’s more cost-effective to have someone on the team handling it full-time than having an agency bill you for it.

“We’re living in a fast-paced world where we need to gather and analyze data to make intelligent business decisions in a matter of seconds and minutes,” said Kasey Skala, digital communication manager at Great Clips. “Brands who house these decision-makers and producers in-house have a clear advantage over those who source these capabilities elsewhere.”

Take Publisher’s Clearing House as another example. The company has an enormous stat team. It has more than 10 PHD statisticians working full time. Data is a big part of everything PCH does, and it handles all of the mining of data in-house.

“We don’t trust external agencies with this data,” said Kenn Gold, director of content development at PCH.

Dipping into the agency talent pool
A lot of brands are hiring former agency and ad tech execs to join their marketing teams. Campbell Soup’s Adam Kmiec used to be with Leo Burnett and Draft. PepsiCo’s Shiv Singh used to be with Vivaki.

“[Companies] are re-trenching and re-architecting their brand teams and support organizations to build leadership capabilities in the age of content, consumer conversation and engagement,” said Steve Cook, former CMO of Samsung. “I believe that CMOs are looking outside of the traditional brand person profile at people with agency experience, digital and creative in particular, to import skills and accelerate consumer-centric work to build engaging content and conversations.”

Mobile Advertising Major player & Explosive Trends This is Year

We are in the post-PC era, and soon billions of consumers will be carrying around Internet-connected mobile devices for up to 16 hours a day. Mobile audiences have exploded as a result.

Mobile advertising should be a bonanza, similar to online advertising a decade ago. However, it has been a bit slow off the ground, and its growth trajectory is not clear cut.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence on the mobile advertising ecosystem, we explain the complexities and fractures, and examine the central and dynamic roles played by mobile ad networks, demand side platforms, mobile ad exchanges, real-time bidding, agencies, brands, and new companies hoping to upend the traditional banner ad.

Here's an overview of some major players in the mobile advertising ecosystem:

Mobile ad networks: Mobile ad networks aggregate advertising inventory and match it with advertisers, much as online ad networks do. Networks soak up ad inventory, analyze its potential, and sell it by matching it to advertisers' needs. Where networks differentiate is in value-added services, such as aggregating buying power to strike better deals, or improve targeting. The largest ad networks have their own sales forces reaching out to advertisers, as well as their own campaign optimization technology. 

Demand side platforms (DSPs): These function similarly to ad networks, in the sense that they help match advertisers with inventory, but tend to work hand-in-glove with brands. DSPs are complementary to the ad network business because they more richly describe mobile audiences. But once DSPs start hiring their own staff to sell ad inventory, the complementarity could end, and DSPs would compete more head-on with ad networks.

Mobile ad exchanges:  Exchanges automate many parts of the mobile ad process, and can connect publishers with multiple ad networks. Ad exchanges are primarily supply-facing at the moment, and have relatively few interactions with mobile ad agencies (even less so with brands). Agencies are disincentivized from using exchanges because they threaten their lucrative role as the brands' media buyers.

Mobile Ad Agencies and Mobile Marketing:  One of the gripes you often hear around the mobile ad industry is that agencies don't get it. According to the U.K.'s Association of Online Publishers, 55 percent of publishers blamed "agencies' attitude" for low mobile ad revenues. That may be changing. Several people we talked to said agencies are doubling down on mobile, and competency is improving.

Natives: Other companies are emerging that don't neatly fit the established categories. They resemble ad networks in that they connect advertisers with publishers' inventory, but they express disdain for the traditional mobile advertising model. These companies are trying to find a native approach to mobile advertising that will break through consumers' apparent disdain for mobile ads. We call them "the natives."