Marshall's blog and shared items

How to read 3X more than you do today

Thu, 11 May 2017 02:31:06 +0000

The democratization of the printing press (by that I mean the internet) has led to a new problem: information overload.

A related problem is the shortage of time we have to read the internet. If you are someone who makes money or participates in the world otherwise, your work will be more effective, producing more value per labor hour, if it’s informed by the best thinking from your peers around the world. Right? Right.

But how? Who has the time to read very much?

For the past several months I’ve been reading 3 to 10 articles online everyday, some very long, by using a new tool. I don’t know how much you read but that’s a huge increase for me.

I tell people about it every day and everyone is amazed. It’s Pocket! Specifically the text-to-speech function in Pocket. It’s life changing.

If you want a new super power, go install the Pocket browser plug in for bookmarking, and the mobile app for reading. Or being read to! Then open an article, click the three dot menu in the bottom right of the page, and go take your dog for a walk. Or wash your dishes.

Tell a friend, you’ll thank me later. I just wanted to put this down “on paper.” Now I’ve got to board a flight back to Portland and listen to 10 articles about our biggest customer’s developer conference read aloud to me in flight!

Could bots eat the ad economy?

Fri, 05 May 2017 23:38:05 +0000

Analyst firm Forrester published a new report this week with this bold title, “The End Of Advertising As We Know It: CMOs Should Shift Billions From Ad Interruptions To Branded Relationships.” Not even could, but should!

Jack Neff at AdAge explains based on an interview with the study’s lead analyst, James McQuivey, that the expectation is that big brands are going to spend far less money on advertising and instead invest in bots, apps, and personal assistants. Technologies that give users what they want (to buy) either when they ask for it, or when the tech believes they’d like it based on their behavior.

“Society doesn’t need advertising like it used to,” the study’s landing page says. Consumers don’t, they mean, and maybe brands. But as it also notes, “this annoying feature of modern life has funded the global economy more effectively than any other source.” (I’m certainly thankful for the way that ads have helped fund my career for the past 10 years, allowing me to build a media audience and innovate with technology to capture insights about life and the world. I hope my customers have and will continue to make a ton of money!)

McQuivey says that consumers of today and tomorrow are shifting away from passive activities and media, and experiences that facilitate commercial interruptions. “Interruption only works if consumers spend time doing interruptible things on interruption-friendly devices,” the report says according to AdAge. “Once they can get what they want without leaving themselves open to interruptions – whether through voice interfaces or AI-driven background services – they will feel even more hostile to ad interruptions than they claim to be today.”

Forrester says this could be part of why big brands cut spend on display ads by as much as $2.9 billion next year. For context, total ad spend by brands globally last year was $496 billion, according to IPG, which that firm says will slow to growing only 3.6% in 2017, vs 5.7% growth between 2015 and 2016. Doing the math, that means this year there will be roughly $10b less in growth than there would have been if this year’s growth rate was as high as last year’s. And though these are two different stories, it’s not hard to believe that $2.9 billion of that $10 billion in non-growth could be money diverted from online display ads and shifted to some degree to bots, apps, and personal assistants. I wonder what the other 2/3 of the slowdown in growth could be attributed to?

What does it mean?

Let’s ponder what it could all mean for a moment, using a Foresight model called Incasting. It’s super simple, you just picture a prospective scenario in the future and you answer 3 questions.

Scenario: In 5 to 10 years, a large percentage of the advertising economy has been redirected to the automated provisioning of purchase opportunities to consumers in the form of call-and-response bots, mobile or other standalone apps where ecommerce is the primary or a secondary function, or personal assistants – which make it easy to purchase goods you have asked for or might want.

Question 1: What might be unusually good in this scenario?

Surprise! You got recommended something you didn’t even know you wanted and it’s great!
Right on! You consumed less stuff that you really didn’t need, and then we didn’t all die from climate collapse.

Question 2: What might be unusually bad in this scenario?

Oops! The formerly ad-supported press collapses and our social and self-awareness takes a nose dive. We slip into unchecked authoritarian politics. (Though we are beginning to learn why people pay to subscribe to media outlets, too.)
Peter Pan: there are lots of new jobs at the end of the automated bot line, opportunities to be uniquely human all queued up for us, but people might not retrain fast enough to do those jobs. (“I have complete faith in the ability to identify job gaps and develop educational tools to address those gaps,” said Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data and Society, a research institute, in an interview published yesterday. “I have zero confidence in us having the political will to address the socio-economic factors that are underpinning skill training.”)

Question 3: How will going to work be different in this scenario?

People being human will stand at the end of a series of machine analysis, processes, and maybe interactions with customers. Hopefully the machines will be good enough they won’t leave people screaming for another human immediately.
People will be hired for writing and optimizing narratives and detection algorithms for bots. As my friend Schlomo Rabinowitz said recently, “don’t carpet-bomb your company name all over the socials,” and “If people spent as much time writing bot copy as the four coders of [classic 1977 computer game] Zork did writing their narrative, maybe their bot would be just as memorable.”

Those are just a few of my thoughts about what it could look like for a lot of ad dollars to shift to bots and personal assistants. Hopefully it would be a big boost to utility for consumers, and hopefully less intrusive than the status quo.

Photo: Robot on Unsplash by Charlie Deets.

B2B influencer marketing is an acquired skill

Thu, 04 May 2017 23:29:34 +0000

“In B2B [vs B2C influencer marketing] you need to spread the net a bit wider, keep the networks alive, keep the content flowing, and the chances are more likely that someone who influences a decision maker will see my content,” said IBM’s Andrew Grill in a wise and thought provoking interview with marketing thought leader Mark Schaefer today. (“Unraveling the secrets of B2B influencer marketing“) Right: Andrew Grill stops Tweeting to listen to something important, a nice Creative Commons photo by Guido van Nispen from 2009.

The interview is good, I recommend reading it, and it really got my wheels spinning. Below are my comments on the post, which I posted on Mark’s site but am posting here as well, including with anchor links to the specific parts of the interview that each comment is in response to. Some of it I agree with

– Indirect nature of B2B sales. Love it. I’ve been thinking about influencer marketing (B2B and B2C) as having “2nd order effects.” For example, influencer engagement yields press opportunities and press opportunities drive sales leads. Or influencer engagement generates speaking and event opportunities and speaking and events drive leads. It’s not just about how influencer marketing and engagement drive leads directly. Often, it’s about how accumulated influencer relationships lead to opportunities that offer leverage to your brand.
– B2B influencers have to be relevant to the product. Love it. Contextually relevant influence will drive more qualified leads – but it will also offer something more to the relationship. Those times when you’ve invited the influencers behind the scenes, shown them your R&D etc? If they’re relevant to your brand – then they’re going to have some great advice about your product and market – and that’s far more value than just short term sales leads. Also, the flip side is true. If you want to engage with a market influencer, it’s good if your brand is relevant to them – it’s even better if you the person doing the outreach is relevant to them as well.
– Influencers risk personal brand in exchange for market validation. Yup.
– Affiliate sales model: I do not like it. Wasn’t Andrew just talking about the indirect nature of sales via B2B influencer marketing? Who do we expect to always use an affiliate URL? Or are we talking about affiliate specific cookies? Attribution seems to a real cluster here and it feels like Andrew is trying to have his cake and eat it too: on one hand he says you’ve got to play the long game with year-round relationship building, but on the other hand he’s saying we all know it has to drive cold hard cash immediately and measurably. Hmmmm….I’d like to see some examples of this.
– Internal influencers, employees. Hopefully. If you’ve got a culture that encourages time spent on social media, taking risks and adding value. How many companies is that true of? Too few. And your employees need to step up to the plate, too. Will you object to their time spent building that influence online because they haven’t sold enough product through their trackable affiliate links back to the company’s e-commerce pages?

– Press-investors-influencers as the three external legs of the stool. That’s awesome, love it.
– Long term relationships are great, but why are we presuming we’re paying people cash here? I don’t assume that. A very, very small percentage of the B2B relationships we see or help facilitate are paid. That can be great, but it’s certainly not something I’d assume.
– The measurement discussion here gave short shrift to the way complex sales can be impacted by compound influence that’s built up over a history of engagement. The best deal my team closed last month was with someone we’d been engaging with on social for a year and a half. She didn’t have budget to buy when we first started talking – but we kept in touch online. She’s advocated for us publicly along the way. When her firm had an opportunity to buy, she was an internal advocate. Who wants to go back and record the eventual contract value next to every history of casual ongoing engagement over the past year and a half?

Those are my 2 cents! I spend all day every day thinking about this stuff as we build out the Little Bird influencer discovery and research application inside of Sprinklr. The research part of B2B influencer marketing warrants a ton more discussion too, I believe. You addressed using insights from individual relationships to inform business strategy, but there’s a whole thick layer of valuable insights available from aggregate analysis of B2B influencer activity as well. See, for example, this post titled “4 ways to use influencer network visualization for marketing and intelligence.” http://www.getlittlebird.com/blog/4-ways-to-use-network-visualization-for-marketing-and-intel

Thanks again for covering this topic and so well! Really exciting to know that a world full of marketers are going to read this interview and up level the sophistication of their thinking on influencer marketing in B2B.

If fake news is wrong, what’s it take to be right?

Tue, 02 May 2017 15:28:39 +0000

Almost everybody secretly likes to say “well actually…” that annoying catch-phrase of the Mansplainer. I think one of the most visceral appeals of fake news on social media is that it gives many people a chance to “be right” for a change. What if the antidote to Fake News wasn’t trying to prove to people that the news they’re reading is wrong – but instead giving them more opportunities to be right?

Reading yesterday’s post on Venturebeat titled “Can AI Detect Fake News?” got me thinking about the nature of truth, our relationships with it, and what data+automation could do to at least dial back some strident opinions where they post danger.

In that post, Hira Saeed concludes “There is a role for AI to play in separating fact from fiction when it comes to news stories. The question remains whether readers still care about the difference.”

At first blush I thought that was a silly conclusion to end with but I’m reminded of something Seth Godin once wrote: “Sometimes we find ourselves in a discussion where the most coherent, actionable, rational argument wins. Sometimes, but not often. People like us do things like this.”

Further, one many matters there may be a clear truth. Eg “Hillary Clinton does not have Parkinsons.” But on many matters, there really isn’t a single ultimate version of truth. I read a few months ago about a paradigm called Feminist Standpoint Theory, which argues that in many instances there isn’t a single bedrock version of truth, but rather the best way to get a picture of reality is by taking into account as many and as diverse a set of lived experiences as possible. I really like that.

In a recent New Yorker piece called Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, Elizabeth Kolbert summarizes research that concludes with two interesting suggestions for the future. First, asking someone with a strident (and let’s say wrong) opinion to explain that opinion leads to much lower self-reported confidence in that opinion than you see prior to an attempt to explain. And second, merely introducing doubt in a public setting greatly deflates the social pressure to go along with a theory.

(Related research says it’s easy to get conservatives to support things like refugees and the environment if you just appeal to their values of authority, purity, and patriotism. Barf! But stay with me here for a moment.)

Put all of this together and what could big data plus automation do about “fake news?” One set of things it could do would be to offer people a chance to be right again, to know more than other people know, by discovering and analyzing a multitude of perspectives, introducing doubt, and maybe offering up the best-explained critique of something you’re reading that’s closest to your own professed values.

I remember almost 10 years ago, the best political aggregator on the web, Memeorandum, saw outside developers Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter build a visual overlay that told you about the political slant of the linking history of any given blog participating in a conversation. That meant you could sample from across the political spectrum, see which direction a common conversation was leaning, etc. It was awesome!

Imagine if there was something like that people could use to discover and summarize additional perspectives close to their own, but that introduced the burden of explanation and a sense of doubt? (Hopefully there’s enough conversation, enough data, enough diversity of opinions even within common general perspectives, to analyze.)

Then people could say “well, actually…” and deflate some of this fake news themselves. Just an idea

Bots: Going back to the fundamentals of social media

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:02:47 +0000

I’ve been starting all my mobile Tweet reading from a bookmark in Safari to this list of the top 100 influencers in the field of Bots, as compiled by Little Bird’s social graph analysis, and I just keep coming back to this interview with my friend and social media veteran Schlomo Rabinowitz this week on Chatbots Magazine.

I listened to it read aloud (by a text to speech bot in Pocket) while on a beautiful run along the river in downtown Portland, then I used the incredible Mac desktop Summary Service to pull out what really are the three most important lines of the interview.

I want to put these lines from Schlomo here in context but I also want to link to this mind-meltingly great talk by designer Erika Hall given at the Talkabot conference Schlomo put together recently. Hall argues that the rise of bots is going to save application design because it’s going to demand we think through the value and the experience of apps with words and dialogue before we start worrying about how the application looks. Most app design today is like shooting a movie first and then writing the script, she says. Incredible talk, which I also listened to on the same run. (A nice slow five miles on a sunny day.)

Here’s Schlomo…

On the importance of getting the social part of bots right – because it’s the part that faces your customers: “…bot design, just like all work that involves crafting trust, probably should not be delegated to your intern.”

On the opportunity people have today to make a name for yourself and your work in this new emerging medium: “…What I do know is that most people don’t actually try to do anything, so the barrier to entry to be heard is pretty easy — as long as you are intentional in who you want to influence, and don’t carpet-bomb your company name all over the socials.”

On the dynamic nature of the engagement that’s required for success:
“…When I say ‘do the good work,’ I mean that we should respect the fact that a good bot is constantly evolving its conversational narrative; much like how you should constantly tweak your marketing messaging.”

That’s a pretty good summary of this 1500 word interview Schlomo did this week, just those three quotes, but the whole thing is worth reading – or listening to.

The other line I’ve now quoted 3 times in conversations with people in the two days since I read the interview was this one, about the world famous 1977 classic text adventure game Zork. “If people spent as much time writing bot copy as the four coders of Zork did writing their narrative, maybe their bot would be just as memorable.” Yes!

Thanks Schlomo!

Building feedback loops for finding flow in serious work

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 18:46:05 +0000

“Inspiration arrives at surprising times, but it prefers to find you working,” Picasso reportedly said. As someone who aspires to develop my self and my skills, and to make the world a better, more just place, I like to think about working in many different ways.

One of the ways I’m thinking about work is this: building feedback loops to optimize for the conditions conducive to entering a state of flow may be a powerful enabler for competing in competitive endeavors.

“Serious Work” seems like a category in and of itself. While reading the wonderful book Checklist Manifesto, I was struck by the difference between my aspirational checklists (20 things I try to do each morning before leaving the house) and the checklists used in building construction or surgery. My aspirational checklists are really helpful, but it’s not the end of the world if I fail to check of some or many of the items on them in a given day. The same cannot be said about the checklists used at construction sites for complex real-world structures.

This morning when reading about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s trip to China where he used language from the Chinese government that observers say suggested a new willingness to concede to Chinese aspirations of expanded regional dominance, and he said that US media visibility into his trip wasn’t something he needed to accomplish his mission – I thought, “there’s a man I’d like to see using a different checklist for this very serious work.”

Much of our work probably falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum between construction or imperial statecraft on one hand and my morning to-dos that include filling the bird feeders and doing push-ups. Even where our work might not fall into the category of Serious Work, though, I think that inspiration can be drawn from that kind of effort.

Serious work is competitive and competition requires that winners enter into a state of Flow, at least some of the time. I listened to a wonderful podcast recently, which I’m unfortunately unable to find a link to, about the conditions most conducive to entering a state of flow. I took note of those conditions though: attention, risk, and embodied intelligence.

I’d like to introduce a third concept to this discussion (after Serious Work and Flow) and that’s feedback loops.

“Feedback loops are important for building good systems because they allow you to keep track of many different pieces without feeling the pressure to predict what is going to happen with everything,” wrote James Clear in a recent blog post. “Forget about predicting the future and build a system that can signal when you need to make adjustments.”

I would argue that keeping track of all the factors involved in doing serious work falls outside of a flow state and more into an administrative state. Administering checklists is a great way to do this, and monitoring those and other feedback loops at designated times allows you to focus on entering into a flow state during other times.

So in order to be competitive in a serious work environment, it’s good to use feedback loops that provide infrastructure for consistently entering a flow state.

A feedback loop for how often you’re creating the supporting conditions for a flow state is an exciting idea.

For the past month, I’ve been doing daily and weekly check-ins on four tactics. I just revised the list for the coming weeks and it’s now: meditation, book reading, keeping a log of execution-oriented tasks I’ve completed in a day, and Pomodoros. Those are tactics that help create attention, risk, and embodied intelligence – especially if I can keep a steady routine of exercise going. (Which I struggle with.)

I would argue that managing these feedback loops becomes a light form of Serious Work itself. I don’t want to screw it up. If I stumble in recording my efforts to create conditions conducive to flow, or doing weekly check-ins on my logs from the week, then I may just fall off the wagon entirely. As such, these feedback loops require both Flow and feedback loops on feedback loops. Getting into a flow state around tracking and revising behavior based on feedback loops helps imbue that work with a sense of inherent meaning.

Finally, this ends up feeling like a nested pattern of serious work needing flow, which needs feedback loops, those feedback loops being serious work, that serious work needing flow, and that flow being supported by the aforementioned feedback loops. Feedback loops on the conditions conducive to flow can be serious work. And that’s a process I’m excited to explore. Towards no specific goals.

“Inspiration arrives at unexpected times, but it prefers to find you working.”

What I’m working on this month

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 08:01:11 +0000

I love a good log book. “Captain’s log, Star Date…” Etc.

I’m big into keeping a journal, I have been for the past couple years, and I review month and year old entries each day.

A log is great for context, history, accountability, self-awareness, and more.

In that spirit, I thought I’d start a new page on this site: a log of what I’m working on. I’m going to try to update it monthly. If we talk, and you’ve already read that page- then you’ll already know what I’m up to in general and we can jump into specifics. What are you working on right now?

Here’s my log.

AI will never be fully automated

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 07:55:19 +0000

AdWeek covers a Coca Cola exec, Mariano Bosaz, the brand’s global senior digital director, saying at Mobile World Congress this week, that Coke is interested in doing a lot of automated, AI-powered ad creative work.

“In theory, Bosaz thinks AI could be used by his team for everything from creating music for ads, writing scripts, posting a spot on social media and buying media. ‘It doesn’t need anyone else to do that but a robot—that’s a long-term vision,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if we can do it 100 percent with robots yet—maybe one day—but bots is the first expression of where that is going.’

“Bosaz isn’t alone in envisioning human-less creative. AI is already being used to create commercial music and jingles and publishers like the AP are experimenting with using robots to write copy.”

I’d argue that the framing here is counter-productive: AI shouldn’t be thought of as free of humans, it’s much more about collaboration with humans, hopefully extending and augmenting our human work. Increasing labor productivity, but usually still involving human labor.

How is the common perspective this article advances off-base? How many ways will, and should, humans always be a part of the story?

Humans will need to…

Clean the data that trains the AI
Set the parameters for what a desirable outcome will look like
Judge the effectiveness of the output of the AI, based on criteria and assumptions that hopefully will be equitable and just
Interpret the data that AI crunches, including with symphonic thinking that draws connections between one conclusion or one data set and another.

And much more. Much better to think of AI as a part of a large trend of augmenting knowledge work. Advertising, for example, won’t be done by AI – it will be (and programatic ad targeting already is in some cases) done with AI.

A Networked View of Value and Cost

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 07:28:01 +0000

We’re entering into a networked age where the value created by single organizations is being surpassed by the value created by networks, and humanity’s participation in networks is giving each of us a new opportunity to engage in something bigger than ourselves.

Those were among my favorite take-aways from futurist Ross Dawson’s really interesting talk at an Ericsson event in Mumbai, written up this week by Vanessa Cartwright: Value creation in a connected world: 4 key insights for organizations to lead and succeed in a networked economy

Lots to chew on there, but I’d like to add the following: it’s not just about creating value through the network today, we are also moving into a better position to understand costs paid by the network, too.

All the things that traditional economics has called “externalities,” like pollution or adverse social consequences, are clearly relevant to any organization that intends to tap into its network of stakeholders for value creation. Uber may be a great example of networked value creation, but the labor conditions for drivers in the network are hotly debated. Likewise, if (or when) manufacturing or distribution firms start leveraging networks extensively for value creation – they’re going to need to look at the costs incurred by those network participants, too, if everyone wants this networked economy to last.

I don’t mean to just be a dark cloud – I actually think that tapping into a whole network of stakeholders for identification of emerging risks and opportunities, for costs and benefits, is a really exciting idea that will make our organizations much more effective.

I’ve been thinking of the phrase Networked Foresight for some time; foresight that leverages networks for exploration and takes the interests of all participants in the network into consideration.

The future of influencer marketing: B2B influencer engagement

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 05:48:33 +0000

When you hear the phrase “influencer marketing” – a consumer product example comes to mind, doesn’t it? It’s a kid on Instagram, being paid to post a photo of a pair of shoes, or some such thing.

Well…that’s not the only game in town. In fact, it may not be the best game in town, over the long term. Many people say influencer marketing is more effective than advertising because the world demands authenticity now, more than ever. Honestly, though, paying someone to advocate for a consumer brand isn’t that far from advertising and so the advantage that model enjoys seems unlikely to last. (That said, my thoughts on paid influencer marketing are shifting away from outright rejection, lately. That’s another matter.)

Influencer marketing: Building relationships with the people your customers are listening to.

Today, as part of a 3 part series of posts on The Future of Influencer Marketing, I want to share some thoughts about one big trend I see emerging: B2B influencer engagement. These thoughts are based on my years of serving customers in the influencer marketing market, many of the most successful ones being B2B companies, what I see from other vendors in this space, and frankly my hopes and desires. I secretly hope more influencer marketing shifts to B2B because I think B2B is smarter and more interesting, less aimed at serving the lowest common denominator and pointless material consumption. Whatever, though, I totally work with B2C companies too, of course.

From the top right, clockwise. Click to enlarge.

B2B influencer marketing is going to challenge assumptions, both for the marketer and for the thought leaders, or influencers. Marketers will need to take a more strategic view of influencer engagement. Look at this incredible webinar that Aileen McGraw of Microsoft did with us on her influencer engagement for a #A1 example. Remarkable.

Influential people in B2B will need to navigate what it means to work with brands in the future. Is it a peer-based, unpaid collaboration? Is it a sponsored arrangement? I’m sure we’ll see both and more. It won’t be like the stereotypical sponsored Instagram post, though, at least not all the time.

Technology needs will be different too. I’ll refer you to my previous post about building long term relationships, because there’s a lot of overlap here.

Finally, B2B influencer marketing is going to require a different kind of people, staffing. It’s going to require people who have or who can build credibility in an industry context, with leading practitioners. I’ve done this in data-related parts of the Internet, and it takes time. Junior staff, told to jump in and engage B2B thought leaders, are going to struggle until they have invested time, learned, and contributed.

Finally, B2B influencer engagement, because it requires credibility, and is best served by long term relationships, is going to require that people really take responsibility for their work and reputation. B2C “influencers” may, to too many brands, feel like expendable, interchangeable resources – but B2B influencers are not. They’ve invested years working, taking risks, succeeding in business or technical matters. Engaging them is a serious business responsibility.

Last week was about building long term relationships in the future of influencer marketing. Next week I’ll write about the 3rd of 3 trends I see: gathering market intelligence from your influencer engagement.

The future of influencer marketing: Long term relationships

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 17:34:22 +0000

Influencer marketing, as most practices do, is advancing along a maturity curve. Here is the first of three ways I see evidence it is moving, based on engagement with customers, watching other vendors in the space, and more. Then some thoughts on the consequences of these developments.

Building long term relationships

Influencer engagement has compounding returns and the model of just-in-time cold call pay-to-play is far from the only game in town.

Clockwise from the top right: If we as influencer marketing practitioners start building more long term relationships, we’re going to need technology to support that. Specifically, in order for this to be a sustainable practice, we should be able to track our organization’s history of engagement with a given thought leader and we should be able to leverage automation as much as possible where appropriate. I like to say: let’s use automation to surface opportunities to engage – let’s not use automation for the actual engagement itself.

Next, we’re going to need to get to know the people we’re engaging with: as a group, as individuals but across platforms, and based on relationships built by the right people in the right places in our organizations. For your company to get to know influential people well is a staffing issue.

Finally, developing long term relationships and working with people over time requires that we give up some control. I’ve honestly had someone say “these thought leaders you found are great…how do I get them to do what I want?” Lol, yeah so…that’s not really how it works. We’re going to engage with and collaborate with these people respectfully, as peers. That means two other things: we need an organizational structure that supports that kind of work and we need to be selective about the people we engage with. Since they won’t be reporting to us – let’s vet them before we spend a bunch of time engaging them. Or we could use software to discover and vet thought leaders for credibility in specific contexts, then use its automation to track opportunities and history of engaging with them…that’s what I suggest.

This post took longer to write than I thought it would. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum and just got surrounded by kids, curious to look at my computer. In subsequent posts I’ll write about the future trends of B2B influencer marketing and the use of influencer marketing for gathering market intelligence research.

Source based vs keyword based social listening

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 16:18:14 +0000

Almost all social listening is done based on keywords, but as a former journalist that broke a lot of news stories by listening first to the right people online, no matter what words they happened to use, I can tell you that keyword based listening is not the whole opportunity.

That’s what we do in Little Bird, we find the people at the center of a given community (say, Internet of Things experts, or Makeup Artists) and we watch to see what they talk about. No keywords required, we just want to know what they come up with. When they post something that gets a lot more engagement than their content usually does, that’s extra important. Now as a part of Sprinklr, we’re able to get some great aggregate content analysis out of these groups of people, set up rules engines to route messages around to various departments in an organization based on what keywords they do use, and much more.

One of my favorite source-based listening workflows right now is an email alert I have set up for any time any of the 60+ people in my VIP list uses the words amazing, incredible, or new. I get to discover all kinds of cool things and important conversations this way! It’s amazing, incredible even.

Find the right people, watch them, discover unknown unknowns, and it is good. Below, an important conversation was brought to my attention that I hadn’t really thought that much about – until I saw a couple of super-smart people discussing it critically. What’s that saying? I can’t read everything Zeynep Tufekci writes, but when I do…

The challenge and opportunity of Extelligence

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 03:38:58 +0000

Being human is hard. It’s complicated, at least if you want to do it well, I think. Now picture the amount of data available to us exploding in the next few years. Most of that data will be processed for us by machines, but the sheer number of analytical conclusions the machines offer us will be overwhelming, as well.

Models and Frameworks

I’m excited about the conscious and practiced use of models to understand data super-rich experiences. My latest favorite has been something I learned from a Kirk Borne blog post. This is about data science, but it can just as easily be applied to any complex part of life, I think. “Dimensionality reduction is a critical component of any solution dealing with massive data collections. Being able to sift through a mountain of data efficiently in order to find the key (1) descriptive, (2) predictive, and (3) explanatory features of the collection is a fundamental required capability for coping with the Big Data avalanche.”

I added the numbers to that sentence but have literally found it very useful to look at complex situations and ask myself, “of all the things you could say about that situation, which one or two are most descriptive of the whole? Then, of all the qualities of this experience, which are most predictive of its outcome? Finally, which of the many parts of this whole thing go the furthest in explaining the whole thing?”

I used that framework in an influencer engagement training session with a very large B2B company last week, explaining that the thought leadership data mining system I’d just trained them to use could be best defined by its networked nature – the people at the center of the community have built and earned a ton of connections to others, that’s the most defining quality of the situation. The most explanatory feature, I believe, is the humanity of the participants. They’re all just like you, and they’ve worked hard to contribute to the network. You’re going to have to too, and be human with the people you can connect with, if you really want to understand the social space you’re looking to do business in. Finally, the most predictive quality of social networking is its cumulative nature, I said.

We’d previously discussed how all tasks can be understood as either optimization tasks (to be completed as fast as possible), maintenance tasks (where there’s a linear relationship between effort and outcome) and investment tasks (greater than linear, sometimes exponential value derived relative to effort). And we talked about how influencer engagement can and should be done as all three of those task types. So the most predictive feature of the experience is probably its cumulative nature – the more you do all kinds of work in connecting with influential people online, co-creating value with them, the more impact each engagement makes over time.

That’s a couple of models, I suppose, both identifying the most defining, explanatory, and predictive features in a phenomenon, and the model of optimization, maintenance, and investment tasks. What are those kinds of things? I think they could be understood as forms of “extelligence.”

Extelligence

Tonight I was reading some writing from Belgian Internet of Things thought leader Rob van Kranenburg (amazingly thought provoking, delightful to see that tons and tons of other leaders in IoT follow him on Twitter according to our data) and came across the term “Extelligence.”

“Extelligence,” van Kranenburg writes,”a term by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, a biologist and mathematician, is cultural capital available to us as external media.” It’s external, not internal like in-telligence. Get it? Cool.

Van Kranenburg concludes a strongly worded piece of writing titled The end of strategic leadership: be extelligent or extinct with the following:

“In an information-rich, digitally connected world, where much of the knowledge and tools that we make use of are outside our heads there will be a need to develop new communication ‘senses’ that allow us to manage and make use of the enormous amount of information we will be confronted by. This will lead to the development and adoption of new and different types of human-computer interfaces and different ways of communicating with technology. We know this as deep learning and machine learning; artificial intelligence.

“But this is the superficial reading of extelligence. Extelligence, a term by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, a biologist and mathematician, is cultural capital available to us as external media. For them ‘complicity’ – a combination of complexity and simplicity – of extelligence and intelligence is fundamental to the development of consciousness, and your business, institution, government or startup.

“What does this mean if you are over 50.000, 100.000 as an organization? Get the scouts and scavengers on the ground operating autonomously, build complicity only in the links between them. Provide good exits to anyone else and keep them close to where you think the teams are not heading.”

New communication “senses” that allow us to manage and make use of the enormous amount of information we will be confronted by?! How exciting is that? I nominate “the network,” social media, frameworks and models as great new sources of extelligence, of cultural capital available to us as external media!

I said I’d mention the challenges, too, in the title of this blog post. I think the biggest challenge is that this requires stretching your brain, or hiring someone to help you think. I do that every week, personally, and my counselor tells me “people aren’t stupid, they’re just cognitively efficient. We’ve evolved to expend the minimal amount of energy possible so we can keep it in reserve for a crisis.”

Well, we’re in a crisis, but it’s abstract, collective, and we’re not inclined to recognize it, much less address it with tools of extelligence. Thus the challenge.

But wow are the opportunities incredible.

One of the most important websites for the future of big data & AI is up for sale this week

Mon, 23 May 2016 18:47:39 +0000

The future of the world will be impacted in major ways by big data and artificial intelligence. That much is undeniable, right?

But how is data accessed and how does AI make connections and recommendations between technologies, data sets, and users? Through something called an API, or Application Programming Interface.

APIs are already big but they’re sure to get a whole lot bigger. The founding team behind Siri, for example, is making headlines with a new AI assistant called Viv that’s all about weaving together different technologies from different products and services, through their APIs of course. Uber’s API is huge news. Amazon Alexa’s voice API is big. IBM’s Watson is all about building out an ecosystem of empowered applications through its API. Not just web technologies but buildings, infrastructures, all kinds of things are going to have interfaces to program applications on top of them.

APIs are the technical pathway through which the symphony of combinatorial innovation is being built.

Here’s the fascinating news of the day: the most influential man in the world of APIs, Kin Lane, has just put his website APIEvangelist.com up for sale. Kin built API Evangelist up to become one of the most important technical blogs in the world, with his bare hands and support from sponsors, and now he’s walking away from it to dedicate the next months of his life to support a member of his family. It’s a beautiful, inspiring story of a man sacrificing something great he’s built for the love of family, for principals, for empathy, for healing. It’s incredible.

In the meantime, APIs are poised to be the glue of the big data, artificial intelligence enriched world, and API Evangelist already has that community’s ear with its blog posts, best practice guides, and great social presence.

We all have until Friday to enter bids to buy it. Bidding starts at $10,000. I hope someone pays a lot of money for it and does great things with it.

Below: From a Little Bird report on the most influential people and organizations in the world of APIs. These are the API experts that other API experts follow most.

Ethics in Autonomous Corporations, Investments in Human Community, and the Strategic Value of Social Media: Three Good Twitter Conversations This Week

Sun, 22 May 2016 18:34:19 +0000

Last weekend I started what I’d like to make a regular series of blog posts rounding up some of the most interesting conversations I was fortunate enough to have over the previous week on Twitter. Here’s last week’s about blockchain, news algorithms, and people discovery.

Above: thinker @LAPrice, CMX community summit founder David Spinks, and marketer Dave Ewart. Three men, but I also got to interact a little with Margaret Cho this week, which was awesome!

This week’s highlighted conversations, which I welcome you to join me in or just check out from your own vantage point, include the following. If I mischaracterized what anyone was saying, please do let me know.

I’m @MarshallK on Twitter and would love to chat with you, too.

Ethics and the Autonomous Organization

An incredible but under-reported thing happened this month when an organization called The DAO raised $120 million in two weeks (now almost $150m), all from people buying into what’s called a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. As Wikipedia says, “A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), also known as decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization that is run through a set of business rules that operate within computer code (smart contracts).”

The DAO platform will allow shareholders to vote on proposals for financial and technical resources to be deployed in some really interesting ways. I’ve heard of decentralized autonomous organizations more and more lately and the easiest example of one to wrap your head around may be an autonomous taxi that drives passengers around, but isn’t owned by anyone in particular, it just caries out a set of rules its been programmed to follow, and makes money, which then goes to the shareholders who funded its creation.

Stan Higgins writes a good overview of some pros and cons of The DAO on Coindesk this week. My Twitter buddy LA Price puts it differently, though. “The skynet kickstarter just made it’s first milestone?” he quips, “I wouldn’t be at all certain that the DAO is an unalloyed good thing.” Thank you for saying that!

I ran a Little Bird analysis to see who in the world of Blockchain (the broad medium in which the DAO will operate) appears most interested in Ethics, and found author Don Tapscott, @BigPrivacy, EtherumLabs, philosopher Melanie Swan, and Michael Parsons at the top of the list. Good to know.

One Cool Community Building Hack

I posted this poll this week and thought the results were real interesting.

Thesis: We’re in the 3rd inning of the era where networks & communities are key factors in business, life.

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) May 20, 2016

David Spinks replied, which led me to visit his profile which led be to his pinned Tweet – which I absolutely LOVE.

Community building hack: spend 10 years building trust and relationships. #silverbullet

— David Spinks (@DavidSpinks) January 19, 2016

When The Chips Are Down, Social Media!

I was marveling at how few people had wrapped their heads around the great ideas articulated by Chris Boudreaux and Constantin Basturea of EY in this post where they explain just one of countless examples of ways that listening to the social web offers tons and tons of value to people throughout any organization. Why are we just now figuring that out?!? Someone told me they thought it was because social media is still being staffed as an entry level position. So I asked in a couple of Twitter polls.

Do you think corps are staffing social media correctly, relative to its level of opportunity for strategic value?

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) May 19, 2016

Poll: is “social media” an entry level marketing role in your organization?

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) May 19, 2016

My favorite response to all of this? Dave Ewart’s words: “In other words: ‘Would you give the most visible role in the company to most junior hire?'”

Well said, Dave! When you put it like that, the missed opportunities here seem all the more egregious.

See also: Influential Women in Smart Cities

I had a great time researching this blog post this week and people seemed to really dig it. It’s much more interesting stuff than I thought when I got started. Sustainability, money, gender – high stakes. Check it out.

Smart Cities: The 5 Most Influential Women to Know Online https://t.co/3apj6Nq8N8 pic.twitter.com/iGrI8gLgzL

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) May 19, 2016

Facebook Editors, Surveillance Privilege, and People Finding People: My Top 3 Twitter Conversations This Week

Sat, 14 May 2016 19:06:04 +0000

This morning I was looking around the great subscription tech blog The Information and noticed they have a “comments of the week” blog post, where they highlight the best comments posted over the week by their readers. I love that! It’s a great way to really dig into the value that great community conversation offers – and a great way to encourage more. It’s like the Letters to the Editor section in print media.

All of our networks are rich with opportunity but almost all of us fail to tap into them enough. I need to be talking to my professional advisors more than I do – but I also want to dig into the inbound conversations I’m having online more than I am.

Toward that end, I want to try doing something inspired by The Information – but based on the place online I’m most active: Twitter. Thus I offer, for our mutual enlightenment and inspiration, the Top 3 Best Replies I Got on Twitter This Week. I want to highlight them, put them in context, share the wealth of information available if you follow the people and the content in these conversations, and encourage my network on Twitter (and elsewhere) to meet each other. I am super grateful to be able to have all these awesome conversations in a given week!

In no particular order…

Gabe Rivera and the Facebook Newsfeed

No doubt you’ve heard the controversy this week over Facebook allegedly instructing contractors editing their super influential top news widget to suppress links to conservative websites. Jason Calacanis said on This Week in Startups that he thinks a part of it is that many of the conservative sites in question are more focused on commentary than on the kind of original reporting that Facebook wants to highlight. That’s a fair, well informed guess at part of what’s going on there.

I really like how Gabe Rivera, founder of venerable tech news aggregator Techmeme and great political aggregator Memeorandum, puts it. Techmeme has had humans helping machines by editing story selection and even headlines for years. I interviewed his first editor Megan McCarthy 7 years ago.

Gabe Tweets, “A contention (now more poignant): a key avenue for improving News Feed has always been to introduce certain forms of human editorial input.” I said the winning team is almost always hybrid, intended as an allusion to Tyler Cowan’s writing about human/machine hybrid chess teams, and Gabe replied, “I’m sure it’s hybrid already by some definition. What I’m claiming is per-story moderations could improve NF [newsfeed] experience for all.” (Emphasis added.) As Cowan says, the future belongs to humble humans collaborating well with intelligent machines.

Andreas Antonopoulos on Surveillance Privilege

I’ve had the incredible privilege this month to facilitate two long conversations between blockchain expert Andreas Antonopoulos and futurist Dr. Wendy Schultz – both, according to our data at Little Bird, the most influential people in the world in their respective fields, blockchain and women futurists.

Antonopoulos told us stories about research into things like mnemonic wallets, where refugees can upload their financial assets into the blockchain, flee across international borders, then retrieve their money later using nothing but a 12 word passcode they have memorized. And multi-signatory property ownership based on the blockchain, which has been used for example in societies where women have traditionally not been allowed to own property. With multisig Bitcoin wallets, if one woman’s husband tries to take her property, he’s unable to without the signatures of the other 6 women who all own it together. Incredible.

I haven’t been able to share these inspiring stories anywhere outside of telling everyone I know in conversation, but I did Tweet the following this week: “If you’re not worried about gov & corp surveillance, you’re among a very privileged fraction of people on earth,” says @aantonop #Memorable”

Some people were unclear on what that meant, but Andreas stepped in to the Tweet stream and clarified really well. “Everyone is surveilled. Often that surveillance is by oppressive/brutal governments. Ours isn’t (yet) = privilege.” As he said in a conversation we had this month, there are 7 billion people on earth and most of them do not have the privilege of shrugging at surveillance.

Sylvian Carle on the Social Graph

I found myself looking at the Likes tab on a few cool peoples’ Twitter profiles on my phone this week and was struck by what a goldmine it is. It’s another case of getting to leverage someone smart’s judgement and ride along to discover what they discovered. I said “I spend far too little time on other peoples’ Likes tabs, and I bet you do too.”

To that I got a great reply from Twitter developer advocate turned VC Sylvian Carle, who added “and follow, for people with a small follow list (less than a few hundreds).” By that he means looking at who the people you follow are following themselves, in particular the really discerning people who follow less than a few hundred people. Another great reminder. Back when I was working as a journalist I used to regularly visit the “following” page on the Twitter profiles of rival writers like MG Siegler and Liz Gannes. They’d meet people face to face in Silicon Valley and follow them on Twitter, then I’d discover them and learn about new companies that way. Finding the people followed by experts and influencers is core to the discovery power we’ve built at Little Bird, too. Here’s who Sylvian’s following – some really interesting looking technologists and startups.

Ok, I was going to write about the top 5 conversations I had this week but just putting these 3 in context has taken a good chunk of time. I also really appreciated threads from Matt Heinz on inspiring B2B marketing thought leaders, Todd Barnard on connections between artificial intelligence, Marshall McLuhan, Flaubert and Voltaire, Ethan Jewett on influencer data analysis and male dominance, Richard MacManus on the distribution of his great new email newsletter Augment Intelligence, my former co-worker Nate Angel on the gender gap in data capture, Adam Duvander on dreams coming true in geolocation APIs and VC Semil Shah on Lemkin bravado, startup growth and scale.

I love Twitter so much! You should come join me there for fascinating conversations about the future, throughout the day while we work. I’ve been really busy this month so my numbers are down on Tweet frequency (by 13%) and mentions (24%). But none the less: the network is rich with opportunity. And as I say in the tweet I pinned:

In a networked world, the more you contribute to the network, the more connected to flows of value you become. pic.twitter.com/ptDSpT2n29

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 5, 2016

How good are you at predicting things? Here’s my Brier Score for the week

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 15:26:49 +0000

HBR ran a great article about improving the forecasting abilities of teams this week, (Superforecasting: How to Upgrade Your Company’s Judgement) I highly recommend it, and one of the most interesting tools discussed was something called the Brier Score. It’s an easy way to quantify how well you are doing at accurately forecasting the outcomes of your actions. It’s pretty simple. I kept track of my predictions at work and home over this past week and calculated my score, I’ll be excited to see if I can improve it week over week.

I scored a .78 this week over 4 predictions. You want to get as close to zero as possible. I was wrong about one thing and it really dinged me.

Here’s how you do it. Write down a forecast about something you can be either right or wrong about, and a degree of confidence you have about your forecast. For example, I predicted that I was probably going to be invited to join my wife at dinner last night after an event she’s participating in. We’d discussed whether that would be the case, and we left it open ended – but I had a 60% level of confidence that’s what was going to happen.

And I was right! So when you’re right with a 60% confidence level, you calculate your score like this: (.60-1)^2 = .16

Now I also predicted this week that a certain woman I admire a lot on the internet was going to be lukewarm about a suggestion we collaborate on a project. In part just to experiment, I gave that prediction a 70% probability!

And I was wrong! She was pretty into it and we’re doing a little experiment together that’s super cool. I’m really glad I was wrong – but that dinged my Brier Score badly. When you’re wrong with a 70% confidence level it’s (.70-0)^2=.49. And we’re looking for as close to zero as possible. Ouch.

So this week I tracked 4 predictions with confidence levels ranging from 60% to 80% and I was right about the other two, so I added them up and my total score for the week was .78. We’ll see if I can get it below that next week.

I gave myself some feedback on them where I could, and next week I’m going to think a little harder before committing to predictions. I’d like to see if there are variations of the Brier Score, or if I should adapt it, to take into consideration the significance of the predictions. Some of the things I made forecasts this week were much more important than others.

A few other thoughts:

Putting more thought into predictions so I’m more confident in them will make my score better when I’m right.
Without some normalization, every prediction you make impacts your score negatively. I want to be thoughtful and keep track of many things throughout the week, so maybe I should say my score was .195 across 4 predictions.
There’s more to this but I haven’t drank enough coffee this Saturday morning yet to go much more in depth
The HBR article suggested you do this kind of thing with groups of people and figure out who’s best at forecasting. It also suggested that groups collaborate and receive as little as an hour of structured training on avoiding faulty thinking patterns. The authors found that those conditions dramatically improve success.
I love models like this – they are so powerful and useful!

Social listening tips for B2B marketers

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 21:00:41 +0000

I’ve been nominated for the awesome B2B News Network’s Social Listening Influencers Index (nominate someone you love, I swear I don’t know who nominated me but now I love them). When asked questions by the press, there’s always an opportunity for a blog post, too! (See Dave Winer’s Why I Don’t Do Interviews)

Here are my answers to the questions they asked, I hope you find them useful and check out B2B News Network – they’re a good site. And I don’t say that just because they gave Little Bird a glowing review!

How can professionals become better social listeners?

A few tips from my experience:

Find credible experts on social media and listen to what they talk about, don’t just listen for the mention of your brand’s own name.

Second, try making a habit of reading 3 or 5 messages in your stream for every 1 you post.

Third, turn on mobile push notifications for selected influencers on Twitter – you’ll really get to know them and the cutting edge of your market that way!

How did you become proficient at social listening?

The method I’ve developed over the years is: (1) oversubscribe, (2) then create a filtered feed of just the highest-priority sources. Then (3) create a system that makes it easy to see almost everything from the high priority list (mobile push notifications, browser bookmarks). Then (4) dip into the general non-priority feed from time to time to see what serendipity delivers. Repeat! Engage!

What’s different about listening for brands vs b2b?

There’s a lot of overlap, but in B2B – a single conversation can include insight that informs a company’s whole strategy or opens up a big line of business. A mention is less likely to drive a lot of direct sales (I don’t know how much that really happens in B2C either, directly) but is more likely to help inform would-be-buyers when they see favorable mentions showing up in search. So listen, engage, and earn supportive engagement in return. Also, B2B influencers may be more interested in two way dialogue, whereas B2C listening is more closely associated with immediately transactional relationships.

How does social intelligence help YOUR business? What do you use it for?

We use social intelligence to look for opportunities; opportunities to find new customers, opportunities to be informed early about important trends, and opportunities to help the customers we already have with their efforts. By systematically watching the social web for a combination of source-based, validated, popular, and keyword-laden conversations, we discover all kinds of opportunities.

How is social intelligence related to content marketing?

Social intelligence surfaces opportunities to curate content and build relationships upstream and downstream. It surfaces inspiration of topics, trends, keywords, and collaborators for all kinds of content marketing efforts.

What is the best way to reach/follow you? (Twitter handle, email, etc)

@Marshallk, marshall@getlittlebird.com and 1-503-703-1815

How’s that look to you? Disagree with any of the above? Thanks for stopping by!

I’ve been tweeting for 9 years! Here’s what I’ve learned

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 05:22:38 +0000

It’s been 9 years today that I’ve been on Twitter. It’s a huge part of my life. So much so that I started a company based on it. I wrote over on the Little Bird blog today all about some of the things I’ve learned over these 9 years. I hope you’ll check it out – and check out Little Bird.

Authentic marketing at scale

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 04:18:00 +0000

As the world moves away from believing as much as it used to in brand communication, toward a world of networked peer communication and a real emphasis on authenticity, I think there’s a new way to achieve scale.

Picture a person who’s earned a big, relevant, audience online because they’re smart, entertaining, and they have good taste. In B2B, they’re probably forward looking, well-connected, and good at critical thinking. You can’t BS them, at least not easily.

One-to-one communication with people like that is a powerful new way to communicate with the world at scale. If you can win them over, they’ll tell their large, relevant, audience about your business. When they do, it will be more relatable, authentic, and credible than anything your brand voice says directly to the world.

In order for smart, well-connected, critical thinking people who have built big audiences to tell those audiences about you – you’re going to have to communicate with them one-to-one, authentically, credibly, and probably over time. You’ll want to be strategic about it, because lots of people want the attention of people like that. Unless it’s available for sale, you’re going to need to earn it.

I made a little white board sketch about it.

Communicating with your target market at scale, by building authentic relationships with credible market influencers.

The idea here is that your company wants to communicate at scale with your target market but that market now has a shield of authenticity around it. Direct brand communication is too often inauthentic and thus ineffective. But influencers have authentically earned credibility and can speak to your market at scale. Thus, communicating one-to-one with them, with authentically earned credibility, is a way to achieve that scale. To do so, be relevant, interesting, consistent, and use flattery while maintaining your dignity.

www.josschuurmans.com: "Rebooting the news" | Dave Winer's and Jay Rosen's podcasts

Mon, 11 May 2009 16:33:38 +0000

50 most influential Twitter users in India « Gautam’s Net

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:31:29 +0000

Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:26:41 +0000

A great collection of Amit's best advice regarding PDF hacks. If you're not reading Digital Inspiration, you're missing out!

The significance of Google’s Android

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:31:06 +0000

Looks like a good article on Android, 33 comments, consultancy blog. Marked toread.

Top Spots in Organic & Paid Search = Branding