What are we talking about?

This week I have been reading about word of mouth (or WOM), opinion leaders, and filter bubbles. At first, I was really intrigued by WOM. I’ll be honest, when I first sought out to get my communications degree, I felt like I was just checking a box for work. But it’s actually been inspiring what I do at work even more. As I was researching WOM I had another light bulb moment just like I did last week. WOM is exactly what it sounds like. It is when a friend, family member, coworker or influencer recommends a product, place, experience, etc. Even though I don’t directly work in marketing, I found myself jotting down so many great ideas. Impact Plus had a great WOM marketing idea about sharing testimonials. According to Global Newswire, 95% of customers read reviews first and out of those reviews about 65% make a purchase. I’m not sure how that would translate into college admissions, but it’s worth a shot.

I don’t know how to segway into my next topic so here is a picture of some roasted tomato basil soup I was making.

My mother is big into Facebook. Like, really big. I on the hand like to limit what I share. The other night she posted a picture of her outdoor fire pit with her feet propped up, beer in hand and a caption saying something along the lines of, “can’t be online anymore, goodnight." The day before that there was a very unfortunate shooting in our town that made national news. A police officer was driving down I-95 when a truck passed him driving 100 miles per hour. The officer attempted to pull the man over. After a few minutes the man finally pulled over. The officer yelled for the man to get out of the vehicle which he does. He asks him to put his hands behind his back. He does not. He is told he will be tased. He fights the officer. He is tased. He still fights the officer. He is shot. The officer can be heard crying on the dash cam footage. The man died from the gun shot wound. His name was Leonard. He was recently released from prison for being falsely imprisoned for sixteen years. But I’m not here to discuss that story today because I could go on about it all day.

When I saw my mom the next morning I said, “can you believe that? He was in jail for sixteen years and then, gone just like that.” She just looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. The post she made was not about the man who died in the shooting. It was referring to the murders in Israel. I knew about that of course, but I figured with national headline breaking local news, she would at least know about it. At first, I was annoyed with my mom. Frustrated even. How could she not know about something so big happening in our town? Could she seriously not be bothered to read about this? But then in class I learned something in a TED Talk video about “filter bubbles”. I highly recommend you watch Eli Pariser explain the filter bubble effect. It’s extremely fascinating.

Essentially filter bubbles are put into place every time you go online. They are personalized searches based on previous searches and user location. So, for example, say I am going on vacation, and I search “best vacation places.” The option that is going to come up for me is going to be different than what is going to come up for my coworker. So, since I am mid-thirties, sober, adventurous, I like online shopping, I’m family oriented. I think something like Disney, or I don’t Colorado would probably come up. But Vegas would probably not. But my coworker who is single and works part time at the liquor store, well Vegas would probably be at the top of his search engine even though we searched for the same exact thing in the same exact search engine. His Google search history and Facebook algorithms are catering to his needs and feeding him what he wants.

Something Pariser said that I liked was the problem with this model and only getting what Facebook and Google thinks we want to see is we are only getting information dessert when sometimes we need information vegetables. We really need a healthy balance of information dessert and vegetables.

Essentially, the news just didn’t make it to the top of my mom’s newsfeed yet because it didn’t fit her political profile. The cop was white and the man that died and was falsely imprisoned was African American. The story was unfortunately being ran as “bad cop” and my mom is conservative so of course this was not a story that would be a conservative home run. It was not that she didn’t care. I felt bad that I had jumped to conclusions about her, but it made me wonder what other things she had missed and how many other times had I been frustrated with her for no fault of her own.

I think it’s easy for my parent’s generation to get overwhelmed with social media. So, I understand why engineers at Google and Facebook created these algorithms to cater to them and create this “filter bubble”. They no longer need to search through the masses of information online. They don’t have to guess if Fox is wrong or if CNN is right. Because CNN is not even on their radar. CNN is not even in their vocabulary. Their algorithm is so smart they know that if my dad searches for anything, if it includes the words “USA” or “Donald Trump” he will either buy it or read it.

I am forever grateful for learning about the filter bubble and for the misunderstanding my mother and I had because I feel like I now have a grasp on our divide of misinformation. But, with that being said, something needs to be done. It was mentioned in Eli Pariser's video that Google's engineers need to fix this, but that was back in 2011 and clearly we will still have a problem. I know that personally I will be having an open conversation with my parents about making sure we are having open minds and open hearts to what's happening around us. But what about the rest of the world. What are we talking about?