Robots are cool. Fact. From Daryl Hannah’s seductive replicant in Bladerunner. To little Wall-e toiling to clean up the mess the human race had left behind. To Chalkbot living strong for Lance on the Tour. This week Engadet ran a piece celebrating the 90th anniversary of the word “robot”. The word was first introduced to the public in Karel Capek’s play “R.U.R.” (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It was a performed in Czech in Prague in 1921 before going to New York a year later in English. Karel’s brother Josef suggested the term roboti derived from the Czech word robota. It’s literal translation being “serf labour”. For the best part of a century we’ve been obsessed with recreating an artificial ‘us’ to make our lives easier.

Over the holiday season I watched Disney’s Christmas Carol – a film from a few years ago that promised much but bombed on its release. It had state of the art animation but never connected with audiences. Why? Because even though it utilised sophisticated motion capture, people’s natural inbuilt reaction to the characters was one of repulsion. The characters are just plain creepy. These man-made creations sound human and move like humans but there’s something about them that just doesn’t ring true.

This stirred my curiosity and I discovered the Uncanny Valley. Nearly 40 years ago the pioneering Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori observed that people become unsettled by any slight nonhuman imperfection in very human-looking forms. Mori named this phenomenon ‘The Uncanny Valley’. A place where corpses and zombies reside. For the animation and gaming industries avoiding the Uncanny Valley and creating flawless humanlike CGI characters really is the Holy Grail. Read the wiki description with the graph showing the different points on it – note Zombies lying deep in the valley’s depths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

More recently Prof Karl MacDorman’s research at Indiana institute looks at human photo-realism in robots, androids and computer-generated characters. MacDorman calls into question Mori’s principle. MacDorman has developed an eeriness index that acknowledges the many nuances that we naturally pick up on when evaluating another ‘human’ life form. The design principles for human-looking characters he is developing could be hugely beneficial for the gaming and animation world. They could also play a key role in understanding and developing the potential emotional relationships between robots and humans.

With this in mind it made me question the role of automation in social media. There are numerous companies promising to automate your social media campaigns. There are countless apps to help you individually build more followers or to take the strain as they auto follow on your behalf. Others allow you to piggy back on other friends followers. I also see a fair few tweets that are obviously automated but have a heavy sell message in their first response to you “ Thanks for the follow now buy XXXXXX”. This highlights the fact that automated tools have to be used in the right way so that your tweets don’t resemble the Living Dead.

There are undoubtedly some really useful tools out there like Twiends, TweetBig, Twellow and Qwitter. They each have their own unique strengths, from helping you find more followers and then managing them. To monitoring who has stopped following you and listing you in categories so you can be found more easily. Automation definitely has a place in our busy lives as it allows us to be in two places at once. But what makes social media effective is how well you listen to what everyone else is saying. It’s not a broadcast media. You have to give something back. We are social apes. We like interaction. There’s a reason why it’s called social media. Just as the Uncanny Valley exposes the android who wants to be human we can easily pick up on the overt sell or the automated thanks for the follow. To make social media work you have to invest your time. It rewards those who are curious. For brands it means staying the long course and embracing an always on mindset. You can’t just dip in and then leave. To truly get social media you have to commit ‘human’ time. That means writers/community managers (the term community manager sounds too corporate if you ask me) who can tell great stories, who are informed, who can listen and then respond in a way only a human being can. Automated services are making massive leaps but to be truly social you’ve got to dive in and invest your most precious asset – your time.

And finally, these quirky robots caught my eye as they did the rounds this week. They’re from Chanel and were created by Peter Philips, their Global CD of Make-Up. Check out the lovely stop frame animation with a suitably quirky electronic sound track. These droids aren’t trying to be ‘human’ but they are definitely cute and you can’t help but warm to them:

http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/1/25/1249/animating-chanel

Tags: automation, Chanel, robots, Social media, uncanny valley

This entry was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 9:36 am and is filed under Digital, Marketing, Public Relations. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.