Johanna Blakley
Media | Entertainment | FashionArchive for TED
Women of Silicon Valley
Since last fall, I’ve been working with Cognizant on their Women Empowered initiative, which has created a community for female executives interested in increasing workforce diversity — in particular, attracting, developing and promoting female employees. It has been gratifying work, yoking together research that I’ve done over the years about women and social media with Cognizant’s effort to increase the number of women in leadership positions in IT.
Although women are the key drivers of the social media revolution (you can check out my TED talk about this), several studies have indicated that women are reluctant to use their social networks – online or offline – to promote themselves professionally. Long before digital social networks became ubiquitous, research demonstrated that networking was essential to the job hunt: according to the Anita Borg Institute, jobs are more likely to be found through social networks, and women are less likely to get jobs through informal social networks or to receive unsolicited job offers, even after controlling for experience. Positions in fields that are male dominated – like so many tech fields – are more likely to see male referrals.
In the past, social networks usually negatively affected diversity, but that needn’t be the case anymore as more and more companies shift recruitment resources to social media networks, where, lo and behold, we find a population dominated by women who not only outnumber men but are more actively engaged in social sharing.
I recently spoke about these issues at a Cognizant Community for Women event in the heart of Silicon Valley, where, sadly, women make up four percent of senior management positions in technical and R&D departments. The room was filled with about 70 female professionals in IT. During a workshop with them, I had the opportunity to survey them, in real time, about how they use social media and, more specifically, what role it plays in their professional lives.
When asked whether they were reluctant about using social networks to promote themselves professionally, half said yes and half said no. But only 22% said that online social networking had ever helped them get a job or a promotion, even though a whopping 83% said they had helped others in their online networks do the same.
The room was aghast at the discovery, and as we talked about it as a group, it become more and more clear that some of the messages emerging from Sheryl Sandberg’s highly publicized Lean In campaign applied in spades to this distinguished group. Sandberg’s core argument – made quite forcefully at TEDWomen in 2010 – is that women often get in their own way, downplaying their professional strengths in order to conform to social norms about women being nurturing instead of aggressive.
It’s incredibly difficult to change culture, but that is the task before us. Sandberg suggests that a sea change may be in the works and there’s some evidence she might be right: according to TIME, 120 companies have already signed up as partners in the Lean In campaign.
TED 2013: It’s the Data, Stupid
I had the tremendous pleasure of attending TED 2013 and, as always, I felt compelled to figure out the overarching themes of this vastly interdisciplinary conference. The T, E and D stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design, but, as anyone who toils in these fields knows, that kinda covers everything under the sun. You have to wonder, how on earth do the TED curators figure out what fits and what doesn’t?
I wrote a blog about TED 2011 and, rereading it today, I see that much of the same soul searching that was put on display then is still very much at play now. I had argued then that several key talks had addressed the necessity of, on the one hand, recognizing and celebrating your own unique and often imperfect perspective on the world, and accepting the fact that not only are other perspectives out there, but they are probably more valid than you would care to think.
For TED 2013, I saw a similar interest in trying to encourage the audience (and the millions of viewers who will devour these videos online) to want to know what they don’t know. If I had to propose a title, it might be
It’s the Data, Stupid
Big data was an obvious theme throughout the conference, handled well in two talks by co-authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAffee (who also gamely appeared in an intellectual lucha libre-inspired “cage fight” at a nearby bar). Brynjolfsson mentioned the AI winter we’ve long weathered, in which advances that several futurists had expected just didn’t happen. But Brynjolfsson argued that we’re entering a renaissance for artificial intelligence because of the amazing repositories of big data that we now have access to and the powerful tools that are being developed to make sense of them.
Sergey Brin attended the conference and he has long been a proponent of turning academic science on its head: why start from a hypothesis when you can just sort through unfathomable piles of data and see what comes out? It’s the Google-ification of scientific research, and, as you can imagine, that makes a lot of people really nervous.
Why? Because we’re ceding responsibility and thought to computers? Certainly that’s a factor. But it’s also incredibly difficult to devote your life to performing research that may demonstrate that you’ve been wrong – perhaps really wrong – about everything you thought you knew.
Bono came back to the TED stage and made a passionate plea for “factivism” – action based on a clear-eyed view of what the data is telling us, not what stereotypes and “common sense” dictate. Leyla Acaroglu performed this task beautifully, shedding light on the troubling misconceptions we have about how to be proper conservationists and environmentalists (paper or plastic? Guess what? The best choice is PLASTIC).
Bill Gates also attended the conference and, although he didn’t speak on stage, his message – recently delivered in the Wall Street Journal – that accurate measurement is the prerequisite for progress was, for me, the quiet drumbeat behind the entire conference.
Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein gave a perfectly delicious talk on the role that ignorance plays in scientific praxis (he actually teaches a class on it!) and he highlighted something that many people I spoke to at the conference mentioned again and again: the adage from geneticists that “you always get what you screen for.” Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble,” anyone?
After all, how do you make the smarty-pants people who attend TED even smarter? You chastise them to think even better, to move beyond thinking by analogy (as Elon Musk proposed) and convince them that they probably aren’t asking enough questions, and the questions they’re asking are probably so deeply imbued with their own personal biases that they might not be able to hear an answer that doesn’t jibe with their treasured “gut feeling.” And then, after they get all depressed, you tell them they can read TED Fellow Negin Farsad’s hilarious (and f-bomb heavy) summary of the conference. They’ll feel a little better after that.
Inside TED: A Rare Glimpse Behind the Curtain
Monday is sort of a ramp-up day at TED, but this year the highlight for me was Inside TED, a glimpse into the machinations of a unique organization that’s trying to figure out how to spread ideas that are stalled or stuck in some way – perhaps they’re trapped in impenetrable jargon; maybe they’re stuck in a disciplinary silo . . . or a Nairobi slum. Regardless of the impediments, or perhaps due to them, TED aspires to create a media platform for awesome and sexy ideas to propagate.
Despite this expansive mission – based primarily on the notion that exposure and transparency are tools for solving the world’s problems – I think most TEDsters feel like there’s a tantalizing shroud of secrecy and sanctity enveloping the TED organization: exactly how many people work there? And how much money do they make from these hyper-expensive conferences (7,500 bucks a pop)? Who decides which videos are posted and featured?
Well, Inside TED was Chris Anderson’s way of opening up the ledgers and introducing the TED community to the brave (and wacky) souls who make this crazy ship run.
Some highlights:
- Revenues? About $45 million last year, with $27 million coming from TED, TED Global, and TED Active. Anderson estimates that there are about 500 core attendees who have spent around $30,000 supporting TED over the years.
- There are 1,400 talks on TED.com, with more than 50 million views per month. Only 200 are from TEDx events (and, so for, there have been 5,000 TEDx events with 8-10 more taking place per day.)
- 25% of their traffic is mobile, and they also distribute their talks through radio and TV channels (they’ve even put TED talks in taxis in Mumbai). Anderson suggested that TED speakers simply multiply their TED.com views by two in order to figure out about how many times their videos have been seen (that puts my two TED.com talks at 2.2 million views. Yowza.)
- Their brilliant open translation project involves 11,000 translators and 35,000 translations in 97 languages. (I was thrilled to hear that the Gates Foundation was a key funder for this. Go Bill!)
When someone asked Anderson about his favorite failure (and he had earlier admitted that the Bono TED Prize challenge to wire Ethiopia was a dire misfire) he ended up talking about their struggle to balance accessibility with substance. In order to get those great, inspiring ideas “unstuck” it’s essential to find a way to translate them to a larger diverse audience. The accusations, from several quarters, that TED “dumbs down” complex ideas were obviously deeply troubling to Anderson. His assertion that substance must always trump style is a challenging standard to be held to, especially for a slick global media platform like TED. And, honestly, to the rest of us bloggers and professors and public intellectuals who must find that precarious balance between accuracy and rigor and the ethical imperative to share important ideas with people who never thought they’d be interested.
If you’re at TED this week, look me up on TED Connect!
How do you measure the impact of TED?
Not only do I get to go to TED this year (hooray!) but I also had the great pleasure of participating in a truly brain-tingling workshop whose goal was to help TED figure out how to better facilitate the spread of breakthrough ideas.
Of course everybody (and their mother) is obsessed with web analytics these days: how many hits did I get? How many likes? But media engagement pros (and the workshop was chock full of them) realize that counting clicks doesn’t really begin to tell the full story. Who’s clicking and why? Did they talk to their dad about that TED talk over breakfast? Did they laugh or cry? Did they feel empowered to do something? Did they make a donation? It can be really difficult to accurately measure the impact of any piece of media (including a TED video) without finding a way to bridge that daunting divide between online click trails and offline actions. One way to do it? Surveys!
I’m a big believer in supplementing rigorous web and social media analytics with survey research. And I’m an even bigger fan now that my team at the Lear Center has developed some innovative new methods for taking into account self-selection bias in media consumption (i.e., only certain people decide to see certain TED videos – there’s nothing random about it – which makes it tough to accurately measure impact).
So, imagine my delight when I heard that the Knight Foundation is partnering with TED to work on amplifying and measuring the impact of their content as it “ripples through society, producing technology tools and best practices for connected action.”
One key theme that emerged at the workshop this weekend was the importance of sharing the discoveries that TED will make when they develop their new kick-ass website and state of the art dashboards for tracking engagement. Information is power and nothing is more empowering to an engaged audience than access to information about how their beloved TED talks, along with all the content and actions that they themselves have generated, are moving the needle.
I’m looking forward to what comes of this . . . stay tuned!
If you’re at TED2013, be sure to check out the Knight-sponsored pavilion centered on Tech for Engagement.
Catvertising & the Popular Culture of the Web
Kenzo Digital and I were teamed up by TED to nominate amazing ads for the Ads Worth Spreading challenge. Every nomination team had a category – here was the description of ours:
Cultural Compass
These are the campaigns that touch a cultural nerve; ads that capture or catalyze a cultural movement, moment or event. These campaigns may reflect the popular culture of the web, having gone viral, or celebrate specific regions or global diversity as part of their message. These are ads that are an active part of cultural dialogue in a connected world, crossing borders and cultures.
We put together a pretty long list of candidates – from silly video game ads to a touching long-form piece about the impact of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsusami on the creative community in Japan. Now that TED has announced the winners, I thought I’d celebrate some of the runners-up that we loved.
For those of you who didn’t have the good fortune of encountering “Catvertising” (top) I am delighted to share it with you here. I can’t tell you how many people forwarded this one to me – and with good reason. Kenzo and I were tasked with nominating ads that reflected the popular culture of the Web: no accurate accounting of that culture could ignore the ridiculously robust role that cat videos play.
TED’s Ads Worth Spreading Winners Are Announced
Be sure to check out the winners of TED’s Ads Worth Spreading challenge. I had a terrific time working with Kenzo Digital on one of the nomination teams, reviewing some of the most cutting edge ads from the last year. Here are two of my favorites from the 10 finalists - I’ll be sure to post some of the terrific nominees that Kenzo and I selected that also deserve some serious kudos.
