Top Social Media Predictions For 2016 | Dramel Notes

This time last year, we published our 2015 social media predictions. It seems those predictions were proven accurate, so we thought we’d do the same for 2016.

Not to blow our own trumpet, but our main 2015 social media predictions we’re spot on. We predicted huge growth in video and paid posts. Just take a look at your newsfeed compared to last year. We also predicted a massive increase in access to big data. We can see this in things like the success of Facebook’s Dark Posts and Facebook’s incredibly detailed targeting options for advertisers.

These social media trends are now well underway and set to continue. But what about 2016? What can we expect to see in the coming 12 months?

More Real-Time Updates

Periscope and Meerkat both launched in Spring 2015. This introduced a new level of immediacy to social media. These apps rode on the wave of real-time updates from Instagram and Snapchat, in contrast to the more after-the-event posts we’d usually find on Facebook.

These were the first, reliable live-streaming apps that managed to create a buzz around the whole idea. Before then, we had things like Ustream and Twitch, but they didn’t capture general users’ imagination quite like Periscope (owned by Twitter) managed.

Since Spring, these apps have grown enormously. Evidently, 40 years of live footage is watched on Periscope each day.

By being able to capture a moment and share it instantly, the social aspect of social media is multiplied. You used to write about a hilarious goof at work when you got home. Now you can stream it live. You used to submit a question to a celeb via a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Now you can ask them in real-time.

Social media users love this in-the-moment content. It’s more personal, and less edited. Social platforms love it too. If a user knows they can always be accessing live glimpses into friends’ lives, and chatting live with online personalities, their Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) increases. This forces them to spend even more time on social media.

Whether this is positive or negative doesn’t matter here. What matters is that the use of live streaming and in-the-moment content is only set to increase. Hopefully the brands using this tech will offer us something fun and creative with it.

Social Platforms to Content Platforms

We can see from the excitement and uproar from the announcement of Facebook’s Instant Articles that this is something to watch out for.

Instant Articles is a sure sign that Facebook is aiming to become more of a content-based platform, not just a social media platform. In short, the more time you spend on Facebook, the better for Facebook. If Facebook can therefore get you to read full-length articles on Facebook, it’s on to a winner. This is exactly what it’s aiming for.

Already, huge publishers like The Guardian, The Washington Post, and National Geographic have signed up to have full articles published directly onto Facebook. For this to take off, it’s going to take more than a year. But expect to see Facebook pushing this hard during 2016.

That may not mean you’ll see tons of full articles in your newsfeed (that’ll probably happen in 2017), but you’ll notice lots of new and cool ways to view and interact with that content. Facebook needs to do this to ensure users enjoy reading content within the mobile app, rather than being redirected to an external website. They also need to keep publishers happy and confident that users are enjoying their content.

Twitter’s response, it seems, is to consider upping its 140 character limit, which wouldn’t be a bad idea (in fact, it’s already possible with some third-party apps). Some even predict Twitter will allow long-form content to be published, though we doubt anything that extreme will come to fruition.

Growth of One-Click Purchasing

Social media, with the leadership of Facebook, is aiming to become a true one-stop-shop for everything online. If reading, interacting, and discovering can all be done on a single platform, why can’t shopping be added to the mix?

It was in 2014 that Facebook introduced Buy Now buttons to some sponsored posts. The same with Twitter. In 2015, Pinterest announced its foray into the one-click purchase arena. As did Instagram.

It took Amazon years to get its patented one-click mechanisms working correctly. Once nailed, they made a killing. In 2014 they had sales of almost $90bn. 2016 is set to be the year that the aforementioned social platforms start to make their killing.

Every day, there are hundreds of millions of social media users seeing products they’d love to buy. Up to now, they had to leave the app, and scour the net to find that product, sign up for new accounts, and input credit card details. This is set to become a whole lot easier.

As these social platforms increase the use of these Buy Now buttons, they receive a share of the cash. These features have been lying dormant for too long for these sites (especially Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram) to ignore any longer. Especially given the disruption going on in the personal banking sector. This disruption means social platforms could help save merchants billions on banking fees by missing out the middle-man.

Expect to see these buttons popping up everywhere. Expect to fall victim to them, and make more impulse purchases than ever before. And expect to see more and more products you fall in love with, thanks to the big data that’s available about you.

Looking to The Future

These are the three major shifts we see happening in the social media sphere during 2016. The common thread is more time on social media.

By creating apps that users neither want to leave, nor need to leave, this opens huge new opportunities to these companies. Provided these changes keep the end user the priority, rather than monetization, these changes should aim to make our lives somewhat easier. More valuable interaction. Less waiting for external websites to load. Easier purchasing.

We just have to be careful we’re not convinced to consume and purchase in even larger excesses than we already do.

What other social media predictions do you have for 2016? Is there anything we’ve missed? Or is there something here you think we’ve got completely wrong? Tell us!

Image Credits: Magic crystal ball by Fer Gregory via Shutterstock, Vintuitive’s Periscope Schedule by Vincent Brown (Flickr), Product Image (via instantarticles.Fb.com), Credit Cards by GotCredit (Flickr)

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The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Wrong. How to Really Master a Skill | Dramel Notes

Malcolm Gladwell gave us the 10,000-Hour Rule. It turns out that rule is wrong. Here’s why, and how you can beat it.

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his New York Times bestseller, Outliers. It’s within this book — based largely on the research of Anders Ericsson — that Gladwell frequently talks about the 10,000-Hour rule, citing it as “the magic number of greatness.”

The book looks at a number of “outliers”, people who are extraordinarily proficient in certain subjects or skills. It then tries to break down what helped them to become outliers.

According to Gladwell, one common factor among these carefully selected individuals was the amount of time they practiced within their area of study. It appeared that only by reaching 10,000 hours (that’s about 90 minutes per day for 20 years) of practice could one become an outlier. To use another of Gladwell’s popular terms, 10,000 hours is the “Tipping-Point” of greatness. You can see him explaining this here:

In the years following the book’s publication, this 10,000-Hour Rule has become a platitude for life-long learners, lifestyle designers, and self-improvement bloggers. This is despite increasing evidence showing that the 10,000-Hour Rule is grossly inaccurate.

This inaccuracy is good news for any of us looking to become even above average in a skill. Gladwell’s rule promised us a massive undertaking when tackling a new area of study.

Instead, it could be a lot easier to attain proficiency.

The 10,000-Hour Rule Is Wrong

Anders Ericsson is a Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. It’s on the back of his research on Deliberate Practice that Gladwell constructed his book, and his 10,000-Hour Rule. Some people have misattributed this rule to Ericsson himself, which he sought to correct due to its misrepresentation of his actual findings.

Ericsson describes what could only be Gladwell’s work as:

“[A] popularized but simplistic view of our work, which suggests that anyone who has accumulated sufficient number of hours of practice in a given domain will automatically become an expert and a champion.”

Ericsson went on record clarifying that this is not what his research showed. Within that study, there was no magic number for greatness. 10,000 hours was not actually a number of hours reached, but an average of the time elites spent practicing. Some practiced for much less than 10,000 hours. Others for over 25,000 hours.

Additionally, Gladwell failed to adequately distinguish between the quantity of hours spent practicing, and the quality of that practice. This misses a huge portion of Ericsson’s findings, and is the reason why Tim Ferriss scoffs at Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule in this video.

On this line, another of Ericsson’s studies showed skills (in this case long term working memory) which could be mastered in “a minute fraction of the 10,000 hours estimated to be necessary to attain high levels of expert performance”, using very specific, deliberate methods of practice.

The takeaway here is that practice may be important, but it’s not the whole story.

One study in Intelligence journal attributed practice to only “about one-third of the reliable variance in performance in chess and music”. The largest meta-analysis in the field found that practice may be responsible for as little as 12% of mastery.

That means there’s much more to mastering a skill than just months, even years, of practice. Genetics may play some role, but science is also giving us glimpses into what else we can do to learn more efficiently.

Tactics for Learning Faster

In recent years there has been a flurry of interest in skill acquisition, and particularly rapid skill acquisition. Tim Ferriss penned The Four-Hour Chef — a 672-page behemoth — tackling this very subject.

Throughout his book Ferriss introduced millions of readers to the idea of meta-learning. That is, the learning about learning. Once we understand how our brain and body learns, we can create a far more efficient learning regimen. In fact, Ferriss, during a SXSWi presentation claimed:

This may or may not be an exaggeration, but what Ferriss is emphasizing here is the quality of practice over the quantity. But even if the real figure is two-years, not six-months, it’s a gargantuan improvement on Gladwell’s hideous promise of 10,000 hours.

What’s more, studies in both science and psychology are repeatedly showing us new, or at least more nuanced, ways of approaching learning. These refined tactics and strategies are able to help us become proficient, expert, masterful, or at least good in a specific domain in a lot less time than we might suppose.

Let me give you just a few of these.

1. Create a Feedback Loop

By creating a feedback loop (or a smart feedback loop), you’re creating a way to more accurately spot your errors and identify potential improvements that are having an effect on your learning. One study conducted at Brunel University, UK explains:

“A feedback loop [provides]…the necessary information for adaptive measures to achieve the desired levels of teaching and learning objectives.”

Acquiring the necessary information to get to a desired objective is precisely what rapid skill acquisition is about. It’s about finding out exactly what you need to change to reach your goal more quickly.

For some skills, you’ll be able to track results and measurements yourself. You could throw together some useful Google Forms to provide you with feedback, then adapt your approach based on the results.

For other skills, you’ll need feedback from elsewhere: a mastermind group, for instance.

If you’re learning programming, submitting your code to communities such as Code Review will provide you with valuable feedback about how to improve.

If you’re learning photography, there’s a Photo Critique subreddit for that.

There are similar communities and forums for virtually anything you want to study. The experts in each of these offer an invaluable feedback loop to keep your skills improving faster than simply practicing over and over.

2. Deliberate Practice

To go back to Anders Ericsson, much of his research has been focused on Deliberate Practice, which I’ve discussed before, and the following video explains it well.

In the article mentioned I explored Deliberate Practice, which is seen by some as one of the most efficient ways to learn. That is, to focus very deliberately on the sub-skills that make up an overall skill.

To delve even deeper in this topic, read Cal Newport’s blog, StudyHacks. To quote that article:

“By choosing a specific aim (i.e. becoming an expert WordPress programmer), you can clearly see the sub-skills that are important to master in order to help you achieve this aim — PHP, CSS, etc. Each of these individual sub-skills, of course, can be broken down into further sub-sub-skills. By deliberately focusing on mastering each of these sub-sub-skills individually, you can become an expert WordPress programmer.”

Based on his research on Deliberate Practice, Ericsson writes:

“The effects of mere experience differ greatly from those of Deliberate Practice, where individuals concentrate on actively trying to go beyond their current abilities.”

Unsurprisingly, Deliberate Practice is hard. Ericsson found that elite athletes, writers, and musicians could only sustain the concentration needed for Deliberate Practice for relatively short periods of time. Their concentration on very specific skills, however, ensured they continued to improve and perform at the top of their game.

You can even find tools and apps for tracking deliberate practice in the key areas of your life. Or just repurpose the tools around you.

For e.g. get better at presentations by video capturing your performance with a smartphone. Alternatively, you can search for specialized tools like SpeechMaker.

The web is full of educational games and tools for different skills. Use tools like Anki for learning any new topic. Try deliberate practice for learning programming. And then practice live coding interviews with new tools like Pramp or interviewing.io.

Look around and start the marathon.

3. Become a Teacher

The idea of learning through teaching isn’t new. But after a certain amount of research, the National Training Laboratories felt confident enough to release The Learning Pyramid. This is a simple diagram showing the very rough retention rates to be expected through various forms of teaching. The pyramid has its opponents, but for many, it remains a reliable guideline.

As you can see, the passive learning approaches offer relatively low levels of retention. Unfortunately, this is what we often rely on when picking up a new skill, especially as adults.

The participatory methods, however, offer much more promise. The “Group Discussions” (50% retention), as mentioned previously, could be fostered through mastermind groups or online critiques. “Practice by Doing” (75% retention) is where Deliberate Practice comes in. But with “Teaching Others” reportedly offering a 90% retention rate, we can’t ignore this strategy.

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” –Einstein

Whether you’re already proficient, or a complete novice here isn’t important. If you’re an expert looking to improve, you have a lot to teach. If you’re a novice, you can explain what you’re learning to others.

Harry Cloudfoot, for instance, documented his journey to become a “very good” rock climber using many of Tim Ferriss’ methods. Many of his posts read as lessons that others could follow.

Taking this approach means that you have to truly understand a very specific area of study before being able to teach it to others. This gives you the motivation and responsibility to really get to grips with that topic.

If you’re at an advanced level, you could use sites like Private Tutoring At Home to find tutoring gigs. If you wanted something with less responsibility, you could answer relevant questions on Quora, Reddit, or a subject forum.

One favorite option is to start a blog where you can publish posts explaining your findings, methods, and results. If you want to write posts, but don’t want to set up a blog, you could write on Medium, or even start a private Facebook group and invite people to join. There are plenty of options.

Putting This Into Action

As I’ve explained, Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule is based on very unstable foundations. Luckily for us, the alternative is far preferable.

By paying close attention to how you spend your practice time you can accelerate your learning so that a skill could be mastered in much less time than you think, provided your efforts are smart and deliberate.

You can do this by introducing reliable feedback loops, Deliberate Practice, and an aspect of teaching, into your learning regimen.

What other learning methods and techniques have helped you to accelerate your learning?

Image Credits: man practicing rock-climbing by Nejron Photo via Shutterstock, The Learning Pyramid via WorldBank.org

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Google Permanently Removes “Change Location” Search Feature by @dantosz | Dramel Notes

If you use the “Change Location” feature to see Google search results in different locations, you may have noticed the feature has been coming and going over the last few months. There have been several articles published in the last week about the disappearance of the feature.

Earlier this week, Google confirmed it has permanently removed the feature. 

In a recent statement, a Google spokesperson said the feature wasn’t being used enough, “So we’re focusing on other features.”

Here is what the search filters look like today:

This tool was used, most often by digital marketers, to view Google search results as if you were in a different location. For example, if I wanted to see who ranked #1 for “pizza” in Chicago local results while located in Florida. Or, if I wanted to see what companies rank for “pest control” in Canada. There is now no way to tell Google you are in a different location, though you can block your location entirely.

Even using a different country’s domain extension didn’t make a difference. These are the results I received using incognito and going to www.google.ca (I am based in Jacksonville, Florida):

Why Did Google Make This Change?

It could have to do with the “Right to Be Forgotten” laws that are passing in Europe. These laws are essentially useless if all users have to do is change their location to the US and search. Removing this feature would prevent users from outside the US from accessing www.google.com.

The feature was likely mostly used by search marketers, since it had few applications for the average user. It will be interesting to see what other features Google is focusing on.

 

Featured Image: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock.com

Screenshots taken by author on 12/2/2015

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