January, 2013

  • January 28, 2013

    • We have too many social platforms according to Dorie Clark in a Harvard Business School Blog posting and I am speechless.  Good thing I can still write.  One passage in Clark’s piece is amazingly illustrative:

    “During a panel I moderated with well-known blogger and tech expert Robert Scoble, he said there was no alternative to constant, ubiquitous engagement and held up a spare battery he carried for his smartphone, so he’d never run out of juice. No time to respond to tweets? Do it while you’re walking down the hallway, he said. Plenty of people agree with him.

    Ok?  But at some point there are only so many minutes in a day, so many hallways to walk down and so many more social platforms.

    Please allow me to offer a modest alternative.  Why not stop and listen and analyze what’s coming in over the transom rather than constantly bailing.  You are, after all, in no real danger of sinking your little social boat.

    This posting is largely good news because it indicates we might be nearing the end of the social hype curve.  This could be the year of focusing on all the other things that social is really good at like listening and through analytics, helping us to synthesize novel responses.

    If we get away from pure broadcast mode and apply some analytics we might discover things like sentiment, emotion, intent, demographics, likes, interests, influence and who knows what else.

    Of course, back in the day all we had was broadcast, which might mean that social really is maturing.  That always happens at the end of the hype curve and miraculously we start getting some of the productivity that was promised way back at the beginning.

     

    Published: 11 years ago


    This is an unabashed plug for my next webinar which will be at 1 PM in the East Next Tuesday January 29.  Details are here.  I will be speaking about some recent social media research I did with the estimable Esteban Kolsky and how our results connect with the economic times we all try to do business in.  In other words, I am trying to connect a ‘Why’ to the social stampede.  I won’t miss it and hope you will not either.  So click on that link and go register.

    FYI, this all came about because I really like GetSatisfaction for what they are doing and because I offered a free webinar as a prize in last year’s CRM Idol contest.  You might recall that Get Satisfaction won that competition and I am flattered to be giving this little talk.

    Published: 11 years ago


    I have been a little slow in commenting on many of the important happenings as we start the year.  A month ago, there wasn’t a lot of good meaty news and now there is too much.  And then there is the matter of doing real work of the kind that pays the rent.

    This item caught my eye the other day in the New York Times.  Seems there have been some legal challenges to using social media in the workplace or even on one’s own time to discuss the workplace.  The National Labor Relations Board or NLRB got involved and enforced a New Deal era law governing free speech for employees.  Nice going as far as I can see though there are some appeals pending.

    The crux of the issue was whether employees kibitzing on social media about work and working conditions, even if the talk is less than complementary to the boss and the business, have a right to do so.  To me this looked like an effort to both limit people’s exposure to social and to buff a company’s reputation by hindering the free flow of information.

    A wise man, I think it was Marshall Lager once told me, information needs to be free.  He was, of course, right.  Maybe in some Soviet era organization of Fidel’s failed fiefdom that logic holds sway but not here in the good old U.S of A.

    Aside from my jingoistic tirade though, social is not just a technology or method it is a movement.  The free flow of information through social has toppled tyrants much bigger than a shabby boss.  We’re still trying to figure out where the bumpers are on the social track and that’s a certainty but it’s nice to know that the NLRB could dust off a law from the last time we were as communally oriented and pop it into the later stages of the information age.

    Published: 11 years ago


    Last week Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new way to analyze big data and I think the implications for CRM and social are very large indeed.  The new way is called topological data analysis (TDA) and it has the feel of hearing about Relativity for the first time (or Salesforce.com) and learning that space is curved.  Who would have thought it but Big Data is not some amorphous mass but something with topology, an entity with curves, and folds and shapes?

    Why is that important?  Well, understanding the shape of data turns out to be, mathematically, a short cut to understanding it or to extracting meaning from it.  Shapes include clusters and they can tell us where the interesting bits are.  Consider the implications.  No longer does one have to be inspired to ask good questions of data so as to write queries that deliver information.  With topological data analysis, you can first identify the interesting clusters of data and then ask what’s so interesting about that?

    It’s a big shift in your perspective and maybe your philosophy.  Certainly it takes human race down a notch in its own esteem.  Now we don’t rack our brains to ask piercing questions of our data, we have machines that do it better so we have to stand back and watch.  This may seem odd, but what if there’s a discovery lurking in your data that you were never inspired to ask about?  Would the data hold its secrets forever?  Well not any more.

    Right now, topological data analysis is a very geeky mathematical concept, just a couple of years removed from Stanford and a Darpa lab but the potential it holds is bigger than anything else we’ve been discussing.

    I believe that the Information Age is winding down, just like the Age of Steam did and just as all “Ages” do.  That’s not to be feared but something to be embraced.  What will take the place of information as the major disruptor and economic driver?  Whatever it is, it will have to stand on the shoulders of the Information Age and use the latest and greatest tools.  Part of that means topological data analysis for the simple reason that our ability to exploit discoveries in pharmaceuticals and oil and gas, to take two for the moment, is maxing out.

    It costs upwards of $100 million to drill an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico; it takes a team of people a few billion dollars and a decade to bring a new drug to market.  It hardly gets said but these investments cost the same whether or not the oil well has oil at the bottom of it and it’s the same story if the pharmaceutical comes a cropper.  Those numbers are big — so big that they represent ceilings to further discovery unless we find breakthroughs that will reduce the costs and the risks of getting it all wrong.

    Already we’re seeing topological data analysis crack some amazingly hard nuts in the aforementioned pharmaceuticals, oil and gas but also in financial services and government.  Anywhere there’s big data there is an opportunity for topological analysis and that means the mass of social data we generate too.

    People at Ayasdi tell me that when they apply topological data analysis to twenty-year old data from pharmaceutical research they find new and interesting information.  So far I don’t think they’ve come up with any new drugs but it’s early days.

    The market has other entrants too and while Ayasdi might be taking the highest road to the biggest customers, and perhaps the hardest problems, other companies using machine learning are implementing roughly the same idea.  Consider Mintigo for example.  This company focuses on identifying sales prospects, which is not the same as generating leads, but it’s a cool and important  idea nonetheless and essential in many industries.

    Mintigo analyzes existing customers to build a sophisticated data model of what a successful customer looks like for your organization.  This is to say that Mintigo looks at the data given off by those customers and identifies the clusters of relevant data that qualifies them as a match for your company and its products.  From there it’s a simple matter of targeting the machine’s model on the general marketplace to see what it drags in.  They call it identifying your CustomerDNA.

    Call it CustomerDNA or TDA or more broadly, machine learning.  Whatever you call it, we’re on the cusp of another revolution that simplifies a major headache and reduces the cost of important business processes to manageable levels again.  With these as catalysts can new discoveries and economic growth be far behind?

    Published: 11 years ago


    Sickweather is a beta service worth checking out.  Like other crowdsourced tools like Google Flu Trends, Heath Map or Global Public Health Intelligence Network, Sickweather uses crowdsourcing and mapping to identify areas of flu and possibly other contagious disease outbreaks.

    It’s flu season and if you haven’t gotten a shot, it’s still a timely thing to do.  Meanwhile it doesn’t hurt to avail yourself of the benefits of some very cool technology to keep safe.

    Published: 11 years ago