What’s your favorite style of music? Classical or Jazz? Rap or Dance? Salsa or Tango? The music research we’ve been doing here at Signal Patterns indicates that people’s preferences for music genres tend to group together. In other words, people who really like a particular style of music, say classical, tend to also like certain other genres, like jazz and world music.

So far, it looks like preferences for a large assortment of music genres can be grouped into five music dimensions. Those dimensions spell the acronym FUSES:

• Forceful (described as loud, distorted, and energetic, and includes heavy metal, rock, alternative and punk),
• Urban (described as rhythmic, percussive, and funky, and includes rap, dance, techno and electronica),
• Sophisticated (described as intelligent and inventive, and includes classical, jazz, and world),
• Earthy (described as melancholic and real, and includes country, folk and bluegrass) and
• Smooth (described as relaxing and gentle, and includes R&B and soul).

One of the reasons we’re interested in people’s music preferences is because we believe (as we suspect do most of you) that the types of music people like reveals information about their personalities. To be sure, we’ve compared your responses to our Music Patterns preferences survey with your responses to our Personality Patterns survey. And the results are in…

Forceful music fans tend to be thrill-seeking, rebellious, haphazard, at ease, and self-indulgent.

Urban music fans tend to be outgoing, friendly, confident, warm, and generally happy.

Sophisticated music fans tend to be imaginative, reflective, creative, quick-witted, intellectual, and private.

Earthy music fans tend to be nice, understanding, honest, sympathetic, and nurturing.

Smooth music fans tend to be cooperative, friendly, conventional, rule following, hard working, and empathic.

So there you have it; there are connections between the styles of music people like and their personalities, many of which seem fairly intuitive and may be in line with any stereotypes you have about types of music fans. And that raises another interesting question: Do we listen to music that fits our personalities, or do we acquire personality traits that fit the music?

The Signal Patterns scientific team is spread between Eugene (Oregon), Montréal (Canada), Cambridge (England), and Brooklyn (New York). Even though we work together every day, it’s a not often that we get everyone get together at our Pleasantville HQ the same time.

A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to meet together again for what we internally call a “research summit” - a few days of brainstorming about new research directions and syncing up on the different science tasks. It was great to put the ongoing stuff aside and for a couple of days go back to research-mode and focus on the things we will do beyond the horizon.

Here’s a “band” slide show of the team. From left to right: Dan Levitin, Jason Rentfrow, David Rosen, and the Lew Goldberg.

We do.

Tired of throwing sheep, hanging out with vampires and the like? Waiting for something to do on Facebook with your friends with some substance? If so, well, we think we have something you should check out.

We just released our Personality Patterns Facebook app; it’s based on our “Big Five” Personality test but completely integrated within Facebook. We’d gotten a lot of feedback from our SignalPatterns.com users asking for a way to post their own badge onto their Facebook profile. With the new app, we’ve created a cool new badge, highlighting your top traits so your friends can see your display and they can easily compare themselves to you.

If you’ve already taken the test on the site and have linked your Facebook account to your Signal Patterns account (if not, please do that first) simply add the app and you’re good to go. Your results will be there instantly and your badge will get posted automatically. If you’re new to Signal Patterns, you can take the test right within the app.

Within the app you can see all your Facebook friends, and how you compare to them by personality traits, how you’re most similar and where you’re most different. It could explain a lot!

However, one of the unique things is a way, we think, to really improve your use of Facebook. For most people, Facebook’s an online place to hang out with their friends but it’s not always so easy to discover new people, especially those with which you have something in common. With our new app, you can explore what we call ‘People Like You’ and discover people with a similar personality. And given you’re in Facebook, you can easily message them, friend them, or if you really want, throw a sheep at them!

Eugene is a really nice town, no doubt. Peaceful and quiet and known for the University of Oregon. Many people think that Matt Groening (who grew up in Oregon) based the hometown of The Simpsons on Eugene and the adjacent town, Springfield. I first visited Eugene in the spring of 2006 when I met with Lew Goldberg at the Oregon Research Institute. Lew and I spent a lot of time outdoors, walking and talking. At first, it just seemed like one of many nice places you run into, but something still seemed very different; I couldn’t exactly tell what it was.

Since then, almost every time I mentioned Eugene to someone I heard some exceptional story: the friend who stayed to work in a local laundromat after getting his PhD, the guy who came to see the Oregon Country Fair and stayed in town forever. I was in town to visit Lew again earlier this year, and was determined to get to the bottom of what is so special about the town. And here’s my simple conclusion: everyone is happy. Not that just nice, or smiling or any of that. They are genuinely happy. Very happy.

Here are a few examples:

• The taxi driver who picked me up at the airport has been in the army for many years. His mother keeps scolding him every Thanksgiving and Christmas when everyone sits at the dinner table and he starts foulmouthing like in the good old army days. And he is happy. Very happy. The source of is happiness is that he got a telemarketing call last week from the local cable company, and now he is getting Internet access, phone, and TV from them, and saving about $15 a month. In fact, he is even happier because he did not enroll in the Do Not Call registry, and expecting thrilling telemarketing calls to happen in the future as well.
• The girl in a small booth selling coffee on Franklin Blvd is very happy too. The reason? It’s a nice day. And to show how happy she is she is giving me one more espresso at no extra charge.
• The owner of the Italian restaurant is also very happy. He comes to sit with us at the table, and tells us a story about an envious husband who tried to shoot his wife’s lover 30 years ago in some other restaurant that is now an ice cream parlor. There’s still a bullet hole in the ceiling there. It’s a funny story and it makes him happy! (Starting to get the idea?)
• The taxi driver on the way back to the airport is an hour and a half late and is happy because he’s sure he can get me there on time.

How can 150,00 people be so happy? Eugene’s schools are good, but not stellar, there’s some level of crime, and in many respects it’s an average American town. It’s very green and environmentally conscious, and used to be a hippie stronghold in the 60s. None of that is too special.

The locals don’t have an explanation. Maybe it is simply an old fashioned and very strong sense of community. People there talk to each other. They talk to other people in stores and in restaurants, people who ride their cab, and even telemarketers who call them. Everywhere you go people will talk to you. If you turn on your laptop two blocks away from the University of Oregon you find that there is not a single WiFi network, not one. I guess communication in Eugene is much more direct.

Whoever cracks the Eugene mystery will be a very rich person. And if it’s something in the water, I want to drink some of it too.

Funny how little things can make a big difference. Even though it’s been a few months since we moved, something didn’t feel quite there until we had an official sign up by the reception. Doesn’t that feel like a real workplace now?

Personality assessment is based on the “study of individual differences“. But how different are people actually? Well - very different. Old school personality tests provide results in the form of a “type”: You may be a “gentlemen” or a “thoughtful leader”, or a “stressed out couch potato”. These old assessment instruments divide the human population into a small number of “buckets” and tells you what bucket you’re in. The Myers Briggs test, for example, uses 16 different possible personality types. That’s not very unique . Facebook currently has about 70 million active users and MySpace about 200 million. Assuming people are evenly distributed between the 16 types, you and almost 13 million MySpace users are the same type…

The scientific method Signal Patterns uses are “trait based” - they capture what characterizes people based on data collected from a large number of individuals. The Big Five personalty assessment framework captures the degree to which a person exhibits five main dimensions of personality. The Signal Patterns personality survey extends that level of detail to 45 traits, capturing subtle differences even between very similar individuals. It’s a long tail filter into the ocean of people that are online today.

Here is Signal Patterns scientist David Rosen’ take on this:

We’ve been talking up our upcoming beta for the last month or so and that can get old fast…so it’s time to at least start getting things out there. We had a successful period of internal or ‘alpha’ testing (friends & family), so last week we started a private beta to get a broader universe of folks banging on the site.

While we’re planning lots of surveys around multiple domains in the near term, we’re initially providing a personality survey and a music preferences survey. If you’re familiar with us, you’ll know we’re taking a somewhat different approach from some of the other survey/discovery type sites out there.

First, we’re providing a much greater level of detail that you’re likely used to seeing. Your individual personality is assessed on 45 distinct personality traits (based on Big Five Personality Theory) and your music preferences on 14 underlying music attributes (based on our proprietary FUSES(SM) model). You can see your results at that level, or at a less granular level, in the form of what we call a badge. Here’s mine for personality.

What we think is even more interesting is the social angle. We’re not looking to build a social network (think we’d all agree there are enough of those around!) but to leverage your existing “social graph” or your connections you’ve already established on sites like Facebook. With Signal Patterns, after you’ve reviewed your own results, you can then compare and contrast yourself to others - like your Facebook friends - and discover others with similar personalities or preferences: “People Like You.” Here’re some people with similar music preferences to, and how they’re different from, our CTO Giri.

We’re just scratching the surface in this post of what you can do on the site but hopefully this piques your interest enough to check it out. To join our private beta, follow this link and you can register. And most importantly, let us know what you think. Watch this space for more updates and/or check out (and join!) our Facebook page.

My two previous posts described Gladwell’s influencers, and posited that while family members make a big impact on our purchasing decisions, it was still worth our while to find these influencers. As for Duncan Watts’ theory—that some people have a disproportionate impact, but that it’s impossible to identify those people in advance—well, that’s a radical and fascinating perspective.

Gladwell’s position (as reported here) that we’re a young field, and we’re explaining small pieces of the variability in influence, is exceptionally similar to the thoughts that I expressed in my earlier blog post. Watts’ simulations are interesting, but none of them caused people to actually act, by purchasing something or going to a movie or voting for a candidate. Perhaps it takes a real-world influencer to make someone act on a preference—to bridge the gap between attitude and behavior. Connectors, Salesmen and Mavens are all action-oriented beings: their power comes not in their attitudes, but in their abilities to turn their attitudes into action, whether that action is social connection, market mastery, or persuasion.

In summary, influencers may not play the role that marketers have expected them to play, but they’re still worth finding. Even if Watts is correct—if social phenomena spread more randomly than anything—we’re still not wasting our time, as these people can still help spread trends once people are willing to accept them, and might also be able to guide general trends towards specific products or services. If he’s wrong, and influencers are still the kindling for wildfire-like spreads of information or action, then we don’t have to stop searching for them merely because many of them celebrate holidays with us.

(note: the image here is a representation of 30,000 random numbers from an interesting post on codinghorror.com)

In my previous post, I identified three types of influencers that Malcom Gladwell discussed in The Tipping Point: Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen. Finding these alleged influencers has been the subject of many snake-oil salesmen and marketing companies since Gladwell’s book came out. Now, Pollara’s study has corroborated what some marketers have feared all along: that influencers aren’t necessary to reach millions of people, and that other factors, such as family suggestion and randomness, actually have far more of an impact on the propagation of trends.

These approaches are not necessarily irreconcilable. There is great variability in how we treat the opinions of family and friends. If I were interested in the best poker website, I’d ask Justin, who can tell me about the competition, the rake, and the interface of any site out there. He’s a Maven when it comes to online poker, and he’s also a friend that I trust—the latter doesn’t disqualify him from being the former. Another Maven might have a popular poker blog, but I wouldn’t trust it if I wanted the best information. So pitting “friends and family” against “Mavens or popular sources of information” sets up a false dichotomy. Pliny the Younger (pictured) was sought out by family members and strangers alike, but among his family members, he had a large influence.

Connectors, too, can be found among friends and family—in fact, if anyone’s likely to be counted among friends, it’s a connector. Finding that friends and family are more influential in purchasing decisions still doesn’t help delineate which friends and family have the most impact. Since I’d rather get advice from someone in my social network, I’d go to the Connector in my network if no one in my immediate circle could be trusted as an expert.

The same line of reasoning applies to salesmen, although the process would be less of a conscious one. Who are we persuaded by among our family members? The outgoing, enthusiastic ones who love what they do—Gladwell’s salesmen.

To sum up, it may be important to find Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen because they spread influence among their social groups, not because they have massive clout in the flat, online world of social networks. They have friends and families too, and may impact those groups accordingly. The influence that people have may vary in both quantity and quality, and both of those facets are important; imposing distinctions between friends and family as compared to wide, non-personal influences manages to ignore distinctions between the two facets. It’s certainly possible that online “influencers” have a greater quantity of influence (in the sheer number of people that they reach), but family members will have influence that’s of a higher quality—and more likely to influence behavior. It is still the influencers among that group, however, that may have the biggest impact.

Gavin O’Malley recently wrote about a study that found that people were more likely to try a product that was recommended by friends and family than they were to buy a product recommended by a well-known blogger. His conclusion is that “so-called ‘influencers’ might have less clout than some marketers think.” The authors of the study, the Pollara research firm, reach a similar conclusion, “Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there,” according to the article. This flies in the face of over 50 years of thought on the issue. But if friends and family are most influential, should marketers give up on finding social influencers? I’ll explore this issue in a series of posts.

Before we get to the issue of how important these influencers are, let’s think about who they are thought to be. In Malcom Gladwell’s 2002 book The Tipping Point, he writes about Mavens, Salesmen, and Connectors, each of whom plays a role in spreading social phenomena and critical information.  Mavens collect information about the marketplace, often to the point of obsession. They remember specifics, down to specific prices. They also want to share the information with others, and to help others find good deals—helping is one of their primary objectives. They continually teach and learn, but don’t try to persuade.  Connectors are interested in connecting others—they are primarily responsible for introducing people to other people. They are action-oriented: They don’t sit around and think about things, but rather they do things. They are curious, self-confident, sociable, and energetic.  Salesmen are persuaders. Their enthusiasm allows others to trust them. They are energetic, likable, optimistic, and emotionally expressive. They love being the center of attention.

These people sound as if they might have a big impact when it comes to the spread of social phenomena, but O’Malley and Pollara seem to think that you’re more likely to seek advice from your loved ones than you are to seek it from experts, social butterflies, or persuaders. In my next post, I’ll discuss whether “so-called influencers” are still worth targeting.