Gladwell

  • February 18, 2011

    • Have you heard about Klout.com?  I bet you have because the Twittersphere did what it does best when friend Esteban Kolsky brought our attention to an article in the Boston Globe about social scoring upstarts Klout.com and PeerIndex.net in Friday morning’s edition (“Ascent of the social-media climbers”).

    Kudos to Kolsky who lives in the Rockies and was up early and reading the feeds from eastern papers, I guess.

    According to the article these and other social scoring sites do for your personality what Faire-Isaac did for your mortgage.  The secret sauce is a set of algorithms that develop a score based on a 100 scale to determine what a big swinging er, twitterer, you are.  Number of followers, people you follow, your networks, lists re-tweets etc. go into a grinder an out pops your score.

    The upshot?  Hard to say, Kolsky calls it a caste system, I say it’s anti-democratic.  It has to be a cast system because it imposes a hierarchy on a random population.  Any population will provide you with a Bell Curve of any attribute.

    People will try to game a system when they don’t like being in the fat middle of the curve.  Everyone would rather be out on the long tail but that is, by definition, not possible.  Some people will be out there but most will still be in the middle because the harder we all try the more the curve simply shifts to the right.  The only significant casualty might be the left long tail, which we will see to scrunch up like it is being pushed into an imaginary wall.

    The article suggests that vendors might offer preferential services or promotions to people with, and I hate writing this, Klout as in high Klout scores, almost as a defensive measure.  You might be happy to risk upsetting someone with a Klout score of, say 45, but you would go way out of your way to avoid ruffling the feathers of a person who scores an 80 or 90.  I can see a discussion between a boss and an employee: “I know he has a 90 but the 45 was here first!”  L – O – L!  Sheesh!

    Imagine providing your Twitter handle as a regular part of filling out an online form or registering at a hotel and you have all the makings of a caste system.  A whole industry may be dawning or perhaps publicists will need to develop one more skill — finding ways to up a client’s Klout score.  Heck, I bet they already do it.  Reminds me of high school.

    In business, much the same would hold.  A company’s Klout score could be a powerful marketing edge but this isn’t new.  If you’re a regular reader of this space you know that on a “busman’s holiday” I once tried to gauge the negative rankings of a variety of companies and non-profits.  The idea was to perform a Google search on “company name-sucks”.  The simple searches turned up a lot of interesting data and while not really scientific enough to rely on, let me just say I wouldn’t ever want to be an oil company or even be compared to one.  But at least that methodology gets some data into play — people have to provide reasons for their negative analysis which they do through blogs or other postings that are usually specific.  And, no surprise, every company has its detractors.  What to do?

    At the end of the day, a Klout score measures a certain kind of behavior.  Like a credit score, which measures promptness at bill paying and personal debt — valuable things to know in evaluating credit worthiness — a Klout score measures a very different kind of behavior and it might not be relevant.

    To me, a Klout score simply measurs a person’s extrovertedness.  About a quarter of the population can be classified as introverts.  Introverts are not necessarily shy, they simply keep their own counsel and need camaraderie less.  I bet they rely on social networking less, too.  That’s about the same portion of the population that is left-handed.  But we don’t score left-handedness unless we have a radar gun and go to spring training, but I digress.

    This reminds me of an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, “What the Dog Saw”.  The article, “Late Bloomers”, compares the careers of Picasso, a boy genius, and Cezanne, an artist who didn’t hit his stride until much later in life.  Each produced great art.  The subtitle tells the whole story — “Why do we equate genius with precocity?”

    Why indeed?

    Published: 13 years ago


    In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz.  You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course of normal lives.  Gladwell’s Ted Talk gave me an insight about CRM.

    Howard Moskowitz is a Harvard educated psychophysicist — whatever that is — who has made his bones in market research.  Moskowitz works in the food industry of all things and his great insight was that very often there is no single, perfect version of a product just as there is no single monolithic customer.  There are several product types that are attuned to the needs of clusters of customers.

    Moskowitz’s contribution was in discovering that there is not a single big bell curve of a market for most things but he also showed that the market is not infinite or even made up of innumerable markets of one.  He showed that there is a multiple but finite number of clusters, of horizontal customer segments, in anything.  His breakthrough was to show that there are sizeable markets for multiple kinds of spaghetti sauce and that sauce is not a monolithic idea.

    To be a little technical, this means that one’s Platonic conception of sauce, in this case, might match many other people’s notions of what sauce should be but, if given a choice, many might discover that they like something different.  In the case of spaghetti sauce Moskowitz’s research replaced a single kind of sauce with six types ranging from traditional to garlicky to chunky to spicy and more — just check your store shelves.

    By evolving from a one-size fits all approach to one that embraces customer diversity Moskowitz was able to improve customer experiences with food products from coffee, to cola, to spaghetti sauce and beyond.  Embracing diversity goes by the name of horizontal segmentation and it applies equally well to food products as it does to other customer experiences.  For what is a food product but a customer experience in material form?  Horizontal segmentation seeks to understand what customers want and then to deliver it.

    In our own design of customer experiences we often ignore horizontal segmentation and simply try to deliver an experience that most people will find acceptable, which is to say our Platonic conception of the experience.  In fact, smart companies are designing customer experiences leaving nothing to chance.  But what’s acceptable to the big Bell curve is very different from wowing the customer.

    In customer service, for instance, we’re at least on the right track because service suites offer a range of communication modes today.  With these modes a customer can at least select the setting of an interaction.  But what about the content of the interaction?

    This issue highlights the importance of social media tools that capture customer input and render it in the moment.  They can do what Moskowitz did for a fraction of the cost and time.  If a vendor or service provider can be in the moment with the customer, a vendor is more likely to be able to respond to a need as it happens.  This amounts to horizontal segmentation on the fly or just in time horizontal segmentation.

    If you link together enough such interactions you can deliver a differentiated customer experience in the same way that you deliver a movie by rendering a lot of still frames in rapid succession.  But note that the key is in the ability to rapidly respond, it has less to do with the medium you use and it’s about as far away from the metrics we love to track like time in queue or ensuring we use the customer’s name or anything else that is temporal but off the mark.

    Horizontal segmentation on the fly solves part of a problem.  It helps us get through a customer experience at hand but it doesn’t give much insight into better alternatives.  If Moskowitz had stopped at the sauce at hand, today we’d have a very good conception of traditional spaghetti sauce but we’d be unaware that deep in the marketplace there were opportunities for more chunky or garlicky concoctions.  The sauce companies made a lot of additional money catering to new tastes but only once they had done the research and began to offer multiple alternatives.

    So while being in the moment is important it’s not enough.  It’s still critical to use social tools to ask the marketplace open-ended questions in order to capture unique insights.  You don’t know where these insights will lead but it’s a sure bet that they are literally the secret sauce for differentiated products and customer experiences in an era when commoditization is turning our perspective into shades of grey.

    Published: 14 years ago