I wrote a book
I was planning on waiting to announce my new book until I could distribute a few copies to friends but it looks like the news is already out.
I wrote a book. Have you ever tried it? It’s a lot of typing for sure. Actually, if you read this space regularly you have probably read most of it since it’s an anthology of these columns and others arranged by subject rather than date. That means I didn’t really write a book and you don’t have to rush out to buy it (did I ever mention that I have two kids in college?). Seriously.
The arrangement by subject is what makes it interesting, at least to me. Writing a column or a blog on subjects that interest you, like CRM for example, means plowing the same fields from time to time. And arranging your work by subject matter lets the reader see how consistent your thinking is, or is not. Fortunately for me, it is and I am.
Oops! Almost forgot, the title is “Hello, Ladies! Dispatches from the Social CRM Frontier” based on the title piece which looked at some research that said most social media users are women. There’s more research in there, too, that shows most people on Twitter just watch — only ten percent post things; about once every 74 days, that is. My point in compiling these pieces was to show the other side of many CRM phenomena and that what’s new and cool might need to come with a small warning label. Hey, I’m an analyst and that’s what we do.
I tried to select my writings about the subjects I know best and that have been most timely in the last two years and I came up with some you’d expect and others you might not. So there are sections on CRM, customer experience, social media and cloud computing. But there are also — among my favorites — sections on economics and sustainability, two areas that are increasingly important.
It was also interesting to see that, at least on my blog, I could be a bit of a potty mouth with titles like “Google grows a pair,” about the dust up between Google and China and “Evil thieving bastards” about the credit card industry’s approach to crM (heavy accent on the “M”). I’m sure I’ll end up hearing about this from mom.
In a marketplace that no longer takes breaks and where the news cycle is seamless, it was surprising to me that the pieces in this book, arranged by subject, could hang together and possibly even illuminate their subjects. The book format offers a small amount of perspective compared to the instant idea transmission offered by social media. That allows for some circumspection even if it’s only about choosing what goes in and what doesn’t.
By way of analogy, they say that the news is the first draft of history. If that’s so then this book might represent a kind of second draft. So far, I like what it says about our industry and I am grateful to have the chance to write some of it.
I already mentioned the two kinds in college, right? Just checking.
Google’s chance for meaning
ZDNet is reporting that the Chinese government is starting to get tough with Google over its stand against censorship. According to the AP a Chinese official said “If you want to do something that disobeys Chinese law and regulations, you are unfriendly, you are irresponsible and you will have to pay the consequences.”
Time to put out the fire and call in the dogs I say.
There’s a lot of handwringing in the press and in financial circles about what happens if Google walks away from all the potential that is the Chinese market. I think the issue is actually bigger than losing out on China because Google is now in a position where it can’t have the China market and have a company that does no evil. If Google elects to stay in China it forfeits its innocence and takes a big hit to its brand. It can’t stay. Its currency is trust and if it loses the trust of the market it will become just another capitalist tool and it will have earned the distrust of the world.
Google needs to exit the Chinese market and it needs to do so in a very public way to signal to others that it’s ok to take a walk from China and to show its loyal customers that it has their best interests at heart. If the company had no intent of backing up its stand against censorship, it should not have taken that first step.
The China problem
Who would have thought that a software company would become a pivot point in the east-west struggle to define globalization and capitalism in the twenty-first century? The obvious software companies that have direct effects on globalization — companies like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com all have important application level solutions that contribute to the global ball of wax but they were not involved. None of them has had the effect that Google has had in the last week.
The search company came to the situation quite by accident, without intent and to be honest, I think they were unwilling participants having been pushed or more likely pulled, into the mess. Of course I am talking about Google’s ongoing dust up with the Chinese government.
Earlier this week we got word of an attack on Gmail servers by computers in China in which the Chinese tried to obtain data about the private email accounts of Chinese dissidents. In addition to the Gmail attack, 33 other companies were hit. In those cases valuable computer source code was stolen or at least an attempt was made to steal it. It was not the first time something like this happened. If you check out another piece on this site you can find more details.
As a Chinese proverb says, “May you live in interesting times.” Well this is it. And keep in mind that the translation of interesting is anything but benign. The implication in interesting is turbulence. The incident, and Google’s reaction to it come at a very interesting time. China has established itself as the world’s workshop with a ten percent growth rate and all of the problems that go with it including high expectations of an improving standard of living.
Much in contrast to what many talking heads have spouted, China has not discovered capitalism so much as it has harnessed mercantilism, an economic system that focuses making things for export while depressing the value of its currency and repressing its people.
China has used the trappings of capitalism — especially importing foreign capital and expertise to rapidly evolve from a poor agrarian economy to one that is increasingly urban and oriented toward building cities, power plants, roads and more. In short, the country is modernizing at breakneck speed. We know all this. (Did I already mention the ten percent annual growth?)
Keeping the lid on mercantilism requires authoritarian rule and control of information to better control the populace. Orwell had it right. But for a country growing as China is, the stirrings of the people for a better life goes well beyond the material. The American social scientist, Abraham Maslow showed in a famous paper published in the 1940’s that humans have a hierarchy of needs, the higher ones focusing on self actualization and self esteem.
The problem for China is that controlling information as it does will have little effect on its manufacturing prowess. But the game has changed, recent global events, most notably the credit crisis, are drying up markets. Western consumers have mortgaged themselves silly trying to buy all of the semi-useful plastic that China, Inc. spews out like so many salad shooters. China’s inevitable evolution as a nation has to be in areas that are information intensive and there’s the rub. In a nation where the state controls information flow, the essential raw material of China’s future will be forever bottled up causing an impediment to future growth.
Moreover the world’s attention is focused like the proverbial (Ok, Clintonian) laser beam on what China does next. The world economy that has invested in China and bought its goods still has not gone “all in” and how the Google affair is handled (and the obvious larceny of intellectual property) will have a lot to do with China’s future.
So far, the world community has been very reluctant to say much beyond President Obama’s comments yesterday endorsing Google’s stand. If it was up to me, I would tell the Chinese to turn back one containership full of merchandise for every company that was hacked. Please don’t tell me about all the Americans who would be hurt by this shortfall of merchandise. Sometimes you have to take a stand.
It took the world ten long years to forget Tiananmen Square and when China was finally allowed to join the World Trade Organization in 1999 it was with the understanding that China’s leaders had learned something and grown. The events of the last week stand in stark contrast. China seems to be taking on capitalism and globalization as if they were at a buffet. This isn’t a buffet — democracy and basic human freedoms as expressed by the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights are all part of the package. If you want to be in the game, that is.
Google grows a pair
Google grew a pair today and told China to quit messing around in its business or Google would cease operations in the People’s Republic. The incident that provoked the tension involved a massive hack last week from computers operating in China. A total of 34 companies including Google were hit and most of the larceny involved source code. But in Google’s case, the larceny was of the company’s soul and reputation for trustworthiness.
Chinese hackers had attempted to discover the gmail addresses of dissidents inside China. It is not clear from the report in the New York Times that the hack was successful but this was not the first time something like this happened either.
According to the Times article:
“In its public statement Google pointed to a United States government report prepared by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission in October and an investigation by Canadian researchers that revealed a vast electronic spying operation last March.
“The Canadian researchers discovered that digital documents had been stolen via the Internet from hundreds of government and private organizations around the world from computer systems based in China.
The five-year relationship between Google and China has been a rocky one from day one when Chinese officials demanded that some Google searches like “Tiananmen Square massacre” turn up no information. And as recently as June Chinese authorities blocked Google temporarily over another issue.
The existence of cyber warfare or cyber espionage has been known for some time and the United States does its share. Some people say Google’s actions are overblown and that the company cannot afford to walk away from a market that has 300 million search users (and growing) and generates $300 million per year for Google, but I strongly disagree.
The logic of not wanting to walk away from this lucrative emerging market has the same merit as boiling a frog and if you look at the relationship to date, the United States is having its lunch money taken by the Chinese. In the name of future profits we are sending jobs overseas and we are not receiving anything as valuable in kind.
According to The American Prospect magazine, since China joined the WTO (World Trade Organization) the main referee of globalization, 42,400 factories have left the United States for China. That’s not jobs, that’s factories. Ross Perot was right about that giant sucking sound, it’s jobs baby jobs.
So why do we continue to kowtow (a nice Chinese word) to an authoritarian regime that treats us this way? This isn’t globalization as it was envisioned, it’s mercantilism and it’s doing us no good to pretend otherwise. This nonsense has to stop.
Today Google grew a pair, who’s next?
Attensity and Nexus Phone
I like some of what Attensity does, though I am not a raving fan, yet.
The Palo Alto company provides a suite of applications that use natural language processing and other technologies to derive meaning from unstructured data. Good for them.
The natural language processing idea is something that I have been watching for almost ten years. In the early part of the last decade, it seems like a lot of smart people from the Stanford Linguistics Department (of some other department) went commercial with their research and began giving application developers a way to learn what their customers were telling them without having to actually apply a human ear or eye to the situation.
Today, Attensity sent me an email saying they’d analyzed 15,000 tweets about the new Nexus phone from Google and showed me the results in charts and graphs. This was a significant and powerful demonstration of sentiment analysis. The brief report showed what people were tweeting that they liked and disliked about the new phone.
Now, sentiment analysis is a very useful tool and I am a big advocate of anything that gives a vendor the ability to listen to customers. I am an even bigger advocate of vendors that actually listen to customers and base their product and messaging decisions at least partly on what customers tell them. I call this, undramatically, using social technology as a stethoscope rather than as a megaphone, which is too often the first thing that people try to do with social tech.
Every technology, every idea has its limits though and the Attensity example shows some limitations of the research method or assumptions used in sentiment analysis though not the product itself. As I was going through the report the data on why people liked the phone and why they didn’t seemed very credible. But when I got to a section on purchase intent, school was out, as they say. There was no data label on the pie chart but it looks like about eighty percent of the 15,000 tweets gave some indication that their authors intend to buy the phone.
Whoa horsey!
This is where you begin to see the difference between sentiment analysis and real research — science based research that uses controls on its variables. While I am sure the folks at Google would be delighted to sell phones to eighty percent of 15,000 people (or was it tweets? How many people do these tweets represent?) or about 12,000 phones, might want to do a deeper dive to determine true demand.
I wouldn’t build 12,000 phones based on this analysis. I’d like to know many other things first such as the ability of these people to buy — are they in contracts with other providers now? And, of course, how many people do these tweets represent? Sentiment analysis is a good start but I want to know more.
So what does this mean?
Well, we have new and very powerful technology that can give us quick answers. But now we need some discipline and methods to ensure that what we get is useful information. We’ve invested a lot of time and treasure over the last few years in the customer experience and much of that was money and effort sell spent. Now as we try to innovate our way out of the recession it might be good to turn our attention to doing the rigorous work that ensures we don’t over invest in sentiment when what we need is analysis. Like any tool, this Attensity product can deliver powerful results if we use it right. I hope we do.
