social abacus

Listening: make the effort!

2011-10-25T09:00:00.001-05:00

Like many other evolutionary adaptations, we’ve all evolved to look like good listeners-- in life, to give off the cue we’re available for emotional support, and in marketing, to show executives and/or the public, we’re aware of what’s being said about us and/or our brands. Problem is, in marketing, as in life, many of us are not good listeners.

Many are reliant on technology to do all the work; to spoonfeed insight into the perfect, executive-friendly dashboard.

As a result, what I see today is rampant platform-hopping. Listening in 2011 has largely been marked by the quest for the ultimate platform. Clients switch listening providers for prettier user-interfaces, better-slicing-and-dicing, ease of direct engagement, access to the Twitter API... the list goes on, and many of the reasons for switching are warranted.

The error is simply in expecting the technology to do all the work.

This error has also led many to make the pessimistic statement: "Listening platforms are commoditized."

Is this the case? Is there really no qualitative differentiation? Partial fungibility? Can a listening platform really be a commodity in the absence of standards?

I would argue, not yet.

Further, have they jumped the shark? Is the pessimism warranted? No.

I see platforms vary widely on the surface, and then in more meaningful ways like data coverage, data quality, and mining methodology. But despite these differences, they all do a pretty good job in serving up insight; several have an impressive edge.

The problem is that the insight delivered will not be useful for your organization until you expend some effort, personally. In my Innotech talk last week with Kate Rush Sheehy, I argued there are three main things that matter when trying to be a good listener. The first, the most important, is a precursor and a contingency:

Get involved in the data. Physically. This task is not below anyone. Change up your Boolean operands and see the impact. Read through your results. Know what “spam” really means in your landscape. You must immerse yourself in the data before you can warrant switching. It’s not fair to you or the technology.

Listening platforms are growing in every sense-- in number, in prowess, in prevalence, and in importance. There are amazing advances in NLP, sentiment analysis, geo-location, and data warehousing enabling faster, more precise analyses to occur. But no matter how good the technology, good listening will always be effortful.

Photo credit: flickr.com/CarbonNYC
This post also appears in the Dachis Group Collaboratory

Social Media Measurement: This time for realz

2011-09-13T07:01:00.002-05:00

We have crossed the just noticeable difference (JNdiff) in the threshold of signal: noise when serendipity has been compromised.

The noise out there can be infuriating. Too much clutter; no sense of what goes with what; what's a "need to know" vs. a "nice to know" vs. a "never wanted to know."

I often find myself talking clients off the ledge as they attempt to prioritize social media efforts, given inexplicable differences in results across listening platforms, varying calculations of influence, and the age-old question of "what's good" when it comes to buzz and sentiment. Further, knowing 'how well' you're doing in social media has only become more problematic with the increasing shift in interest from amassing eyeballs to mobilizing and rewarding them.

As an industry, we're plagued by inefficient categorizations, unstable rankings of authority, and unpredictable, black box algorithms guessing what matters most.

Perhaps as a result, we see more organizations shifting in the same way that we, as people, do as we go through adolescence-- from giving disproportionate weight to what others say about us, to being more concerned with our own actions. That which we can control.

Being in control of our actions requires a different type of measurement and management. To help organizations in said efforts, we're announcing today our public launch of the Social Business Index (SBI), the first application on our Social Business Intelligence as a Service (SBIaaS) data services platform.

Having worked in social media analysis for seven years, it's become clear to me, the trick to finding meaning in social media is to be intimate with your dataset (for context), and to monitor relative comparisons to yield meaning. We've thoroughly taken this to heart with the SBI.

Our dataset includes the social accounts of thousands of companies, their subsidiaries, and brands, in addition to the social accounts of their engaged market (e.g. anyone who interacts with a given account). Using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, powered by our own strategists, we identify specific activities that are being executed by a given brand -- emanating from their social accounts. This is a critical distinction from the way things are being measured today. We're not exclusively monitoring reactions, or buzz in response to a real or perceived tactic. Instead, we're starting with the action per se. We're measuring what you, as marketers, are doing-- in addition to the way your market responds.

We've captured specific behaviors correlated with outcomes such as Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Advocacy. In aggregate, this gives us a company's Social Business Index Score-- a ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of Social Business adoption and performance.

Go to socialbusinessindex.com, learn more, and sign up.

We're excited about our progress in digging out of the black hole of social media measurement. We acknowledge our approach will evolve over time and we look forward to your collaboration to do so. If you work at a company covered by the index, register for private access to deeper analytics. If your company is not currently covered, request coverage.

If you're just curious, take a look at our ranking and best in class analysis by browsing at www.socialbusinessindex.com.

This post also appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory, where you can find my colleagues' related posts as well.

Social Media Measurement: Winning or Winging it?

2011-06-14T09:42:00.006-05:00

People are "winging it" with measurement in social today. Marketers embarrassedly tell me this daily.

In my social psychological opinion, those of you who aren't abiding by any standards, measuring a little sentiment here, a little influence there, and a lot of buzz everywhere are falling prey to a cognitive bias: The Imposter Effect. You're denying yourselves the credit of being bona fide experimenters.

With no standards yet, and no evidence that a global social media metric standard spans all business goals and outcomes, the best thing you can do in measurement today is effectively operationalize your variables. Operationalize in the scientific sense: define the ambiguous concept you're trying to get at by coming up with a relevant way to measure it. We're an industry without gold standards. You have no choice but to wing it, but you can still do so empirically.

When social scientists study things like "health," "happiness," and "satisfaction" with marriage, jobs, or life, we rely on proxies. You often hear things like "health, as defined by number of doctor visits in a month," or "happiness, as defined by size of smile." In lieu of (or sometimes in addition to) getting self-reports of "how healthy/happy you are," these objective measures act as a best bet or starting point, eventually with some validation as to why that operationalization was selected.

Take a typical desire in social business measurement today: "we want to tie engagement to business results." So, how do we operationalize engagement? Importantly, this doesn't mean you should settle for a kitchen sink approach and add up everything to yield engagement, instead chose wisely - a realistic manifestation of what it means to be engaged. As I've said before, think about:

Objectivity-- Really think about what engagement means; don't arbitrarily involve variables simply because they’re available (e.g. # friends).

Reliability - Look for something that gets at engagement over time. Don't incorporate variables that measure the same thing multiple times (e.g. friends on Facebook + followers on Twitter + connections on LinkedIn).

Validity - show that your variables predict a meaningful behavior (e.g. statements of connection with the brand and likelihood to purchase, etc.). A great trick in defining variables is to think of the inverse. Get positive results of what you want (i.e. engagement) and negative results of what you don't want (i.e. disengagement).

As always, when you operationalize, highlight the right aspects of your business-- things that measure important movement and things that matter to those who consume the numbers.

This is also posted on the Dachis Group collaboratory. Join the conversation there to access a wider network of social business professionals.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/mlrogers

ATX: the world's social business hub

2011-03-09T09:00:00.002-06:00

This post was done in parallel to a group of social business thinkers and practitioners, synthesized and excerpted by Peter Kim here.

I left my hometown of NYC for ATX to cure myself of pedestrian rage (NYers version of road rage). This shocks people-- to have left New York City (said with a Texas accent like in the old El Paso commercials) for a funky little Texan town. Truth is, all that NYC offered didn't stack up so well for me, compared to Austin's riches.

I came for the intellectual curiosity UT Austin uniquely offers-- academic freedom most schools don't manage to breed. I came for the start-up spirit Austin Ventures nurtures-- premium value on entrepreneurialism unseen elsewhere. I came for the work ethic that preserves the best of east coast ambition with the backdrop of west coast yoga retreats. I came to raise my family in a place where people genuinely want you to succeed in life.

Quality of life in Austin is simply higher than in the more fast-paced, cut-throat, nail-biting enclaves of the US. Austin is the perfect mix of intellect, athleticism, family-friendliness, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit. And like attracts like: this unique combination makes us the most ripe breeding ground for social business - thinkers and doers. You won't believe the people you run into at Whole Foods headquarters...

People often dream of moving to NYC. Living in today's Austin makes me wonder whether people will soon dream of someday making it in Austin with the same tenacity. Austin is a great place to work and live. If you're smart, we're hiring; join us!

Token 'Future of' Post: Listening in 2011

2011-01-03T10:01:00.002-06:00

The problem with the new dark coffee mugs in the office is that we used to have white ones. Thus, what used to be a known-- the stains, has became a known unknown: a dark mug hiding the stains within. Gives me pause every time I use them- I know something's there, I just don't know how bad it is. Humor me for a second and see how I'm like a proverbial client in a non-customer-centric organization: I know my customers are complaining, but I don't know exactly what they're saying, or how much better my product could fit their needs.

Listening (née social media monitoring) used to be a means to uncover known unknowns like this-- predictable sets of things known to be possible.

The future of listening was the promise of evolving to unknown unknowns-- things we didn't even know could be out there. For example, the prospect of happening upon unexpected audiences (i.e. Dads?) talking about your product being used in unintended ways (i.e. eye cream for cellulite!).

Six years of listening has turned up hundreds to thousands of those kinds of anecdotes, yet still there is no precise science to uncover unknown unknowns. We still somewhat systematically rely on a backbone of metrics such as discussion volume, sentiment, and topics. Sometimes we try to identify "influence," although there is no agreed upon algorithm to capture "influencers." There is also no clear winner/best of breed technology with 100% accurate sentiment mining or topics analysis.

I think it's time for us to agree that isn't the future of listening. Technology will not get to the point where we can algorithmically detect weak signals in real (enough) time to prevent crises or perfect product development-- much more than we can today.

The future of listening will transcend technological advancements. The future of listening-- the near future-- is making it work in an organization. Operationalizing listening as a standard business process. The future is a flow chart that integrates people (e.g. customer service, product), process (e.g. escalation, resolution), and technology (e.g. from listening to CRM) and disseminates results to a wider group of stakeholders.

I don't think the fundamental challenges of listening have been solved; and, don't want to encourage stagnation. We should forever challenge ourselves to better understand the complexities of language via semantic analysis and capture and classify new types of data (e.g. check-ins, metadata), but we should go ahead and make listening part of everyone's daily life without waiting for perfect technology and standardized metrics.

That is the future. Serve the coffee in the potentially stained mugs. People need their caffeine to function.

Photo credit: cudmore on Flickr

Welcoming Powered to our Ecosystem

2010-12-21T07:01:00.005-06:00

What better occasion to hop back on the blog than our acquisition of Powered, today! As Peter Kim mentions, this acquisition makes us the largest Social Business consultancy in the world.

Many will be quick to note that Powered is a social media agency-- "helping brands realize the potential of social media programs to drive tangible business results." I will just as quickly point out the emphasis on the latter half of the sentence (business results) over the former (social media). While their services span platforms marketers are intimately familiar with, (i.e., Facebook and Twitter), they are highly relevant to the "other side" which we so often fool ourselves into thinking is an alternate universe, E2.0.

After having gone to an all-girls school for the first 10 years of my life, I vividly remember my first class with boys. This was quickly proceeded by my first lunch in the cafeteria with said foreigners. I remember being shocked when I realized how similar they were... how they talked about the same exact things as we did, in the same way. I had this same realization at my first E2.0 conference when I realized that marketers and IT professionals too speak the same language.

This is important to understand when thinking about our recent acquisition: Dachis Group is a Social Business consultancy. Many of the Social Business constructs we talk about today transcend divisions between marketing and IT.

While this acquisition directly expands our customer engagement practice, keep in mind we're all "listening" to various stakeholders. We're all interested in seeding, feeding, and weeding our communities. We all need governance, education, and playbooks as we migrate to new platforms. We all need to evolve our thinking around measurement. We all need social strategies-- and the methodologies by which we arrive there are in fact quite similar for 'E2.0' and 'Social Media'.

We welcome Powered, and its subsidiaries, Crayon, StepChange, and Drillteam to the Dachis Group family and look forward to designing better, social businesses across both of these worlds.

Welcome to our ecosystem, Powered!

the bias lurking in your listening

2010-09-20T21:48:00.010-05:00

[This post is cross-posted on the Dachis Group Collaboratory]

The other day my father asked me if I was happy and I responded “I don’t know.” He laughed out loud, as if to suggest it would make more sense for me to say yes or no, something definitive.

I didn’t know what he meant by “happy” and wanted clarification before I gave an inaccurate answer. Happiness can be so complex. How did I know if he was asking me about my current mood or my long-term satisfaction with life?

Like any researcher, if I don’t understand the question being asked, I’m reluctant to give an answer.

This rarely happens in an interview. Never happens on a survey. People will always provide an answer as much as meetings will fill the entire hour. Inherent in those answers is an assumption that each other’s definition of a given topic/construct are the same, take happiness. Guess what? This happens in Listening too.

Although Listening implies gathering naturalistic data, it’s subject to the same bias as the forms of research above. Perhaps because automation is involved, people forget you’re still asking a question, despite how passively you’re listening.

Each of your “alerts” is a boolean query, which is just like a good old-fashioned research question. It's what you're asking of the internets. It requires clarity. Sometimes the bias manifests as simply as a query that contains only your brand name, the way you know it and market it, as opposed to incorporating slang and nicknames. Sometimes it’s more complex-- you think the “functionality” of your product (e.g. cellphone) has to do with its feature set (e.g. app market), but it’s really about perceived value or how easy it is to use (e.g. haptic feedback). “Quality” is another good example of where definitions can vary widely.

Someone once cited some research (that I cannot find) suggesting that when expecting parents discuss their anticipation of a new child, the male partner envisions the imminent child as a 3-year-old; the female pictures a newborn baby. Although unspoken, the parents are completely misaligned in what they’re bonding over throughout pregnancy. This is the exact kind of vivid image to think about when you Listen-- something that conveys how differently people could define your topic of interest.

To be a social business, we need to smarten up on Listening, or more accurately, anticipating answers. Question clarity in Listening demands both query precision and comprehensiveness. Be sure you’re capturing the specific data you’re hoping for, and being exhaustive in the ways it could be conceived by others.

This, by the way, is also why Listening demands data integration. More on that next time.

Fans and Followers; Apples and Oranges?

2010-08-19T08:15:00.002-05:00

“Think of it like a nutrition label”

I keep hearing this come up... with respect to LEED certification on buildings, Wal-Mart’s sustainability index, and several other newsworthy scoring systems of late.

Is a nutrition label the ultimate scorecard?

What’s interesting about nutrition labels is that they present several numbers-- everything isn’t added up into a single grade or score. In today’s business world, there’s a tendency to add everything up, particularly when it comes to incorporating social media metrics as KPIs.

This is a trap!

One number doesn’t necessarily provide a shortcut to all the varied aspects of business. That’s not to say we should open the floodgates and serve up raw data. Like individual food items impacting your nutritional profile, several variables play roles in your overall social media presence and your overall business performance.

A scorecard should provide guidance on what we cannot immediately discern the health of, be it a food, community, or business. The trick is to find the right level of aggregation. That is, we need to elevate low level behaviors to the appropriate categories and then leave them there, not continue to aggregate (i.e. create one score).

Edelman’s SMI was one of the first to add things up across platforms. At the time, it was pioneering and innovative. Jonny Bentwood and David Brain were creative and transparent about their methodology. They were also wary of and vocal about the subjectivity involved.

“This is definitely adding apples to oranges we admit. So for example, we are placing a score for Facebook depending on the number of friends someone has. For Twitter, it is the number of friends, followers and updates. And if that is not insulting enough, we are then coming to a comparative weighting of someone’s Facebook score against their Twitter and blogging score. And the most sinful step is of course the final one where we have added those scores together and come up with a total Social Media Index.”

You, like the rest of the business world, are probably interested in building the ultimate scorecard. You might even be engaging in methodology like the above.

Make sure you are highlighting the right aspects of your business-- things that measure important movement and things that matter to those who consume the numbers. Choose metrics that impact your “overall meal”-- like calories and fat, but also recognize there is value in certain parts of the whole, like qualitative assessments.

What does your organization's nutrition label look like?

[This post is cross-posted on the Dachis Group Collaboratory]

in memory of Devendra Singh

2010-05-20T10:23:00.004-05:00

Devendra Singh was a clever and charming firecracker. So smart. So gentle. So caring. So persistent.

In my dissertation acknowledgments, I wrote this about him:

Dr. Singh has shown me that loving what you do will keep you alive. His wisdom about life, enthusiasm for teaching, and concern for my well-being have bettered my life in countless ways. I have learned from him how to think like a scientist and will forever remember his unmatched ability to captivate a classroom.

I remember the first class I ever TA'd for him. We walked slowly for several blocks in the brutal Texan summer heat. I didn't think he would make it. When we arrived in the classroom, he got up on a table, sat cross-legged-- looking half like a child, half like a yogi, and hacked away until he caught his breath. When it was time for class to begin, he was ON - no signs of distress until the 'high' of teaching escaped, an hour or so after class.

I've never seen a classroom of college kids listen as intently as they did to Dr. Singh, day after day, no matter what the content. I've also never seen someone command a room so powerfully with such a gentle voice, strong Indian accent, and transparencies dating back to the 60's.

Dev loved teaching. He also loved when people appreciated his teaching; thus our relationship. He inspired everyone who stepped foot in his classrooms. And this, only one of his many dimensions-- brilliant researcher, devoted and very, very proud father, gourmet chef, and so many other facets that came up over the years.

Dev was groundbreaking and controversial. He would be disappointed in me to know I memorialized him without mentioning his research on the evolutionarily preferred .67 waist-hip ratio and the adaptive significance of female attractiveness. Students were literally on the edge of their seats when he gave the backstory on this research-- again, using his old transparencies.

I know he suffered over the past few years, especially this last semester when he was prevented from teaching. I'm so sad he's gone. Missing him so much already.

May everyone have a fig today to honor the passing of this inspiring man.

not (just) listening anymore

2010-05-18T22:25:00.008-05:00

The Listening space just got exciting. Again.

Or should I say the Social CRM space?

Coming from what used to be called a social media monitoring research firm, I find changes in this space very interesting-- whether they revolve around the quest for the ultimate metric for engagement, the hot new look of a dashboard, or the advancement of semantic technology. Most interesting is when companies join forces, including oldies like BuzzMetrics and NetRatings and Cymfony and TNS and, those hot off the press, Attensity and Biz360 and Scout Labs and Lithium - both of which are being billed as dominant forces in the suddenly expanding Social CRM space.

Merging open and closed networks is an important move for businesses; so is responding in real-time; so is amassing massive amounts of data. Each of these, a promise of social CRM.

And with each of these much-anticipated-features of Social CRM comes important watch-outs:

Merging networks:

One of the most important precursors to merging data sets is data quality. Have you evaluated the breadth (e.g. which networks, blogs, forums, Usenet, tweets, videos, etc.) and depth (e.g. comments, likes, wall posts, etc.) of the data set you're querying? Be wary of the mechanics of your data before you assume they can be married.

Real time response:

An often overlooked aspect of real-time response is a corresponding workflow to enable a sufficient response. Are there formal processes in place to connect the subject matter experts to the consumers? Before trying to respond too quickly, prioritize the signals you're responding to and make sure there's a process in place to both facilitate response and fix any associated problem.

Amassing data:
People love to talk about warehouses full of data. With APIs opened up, are you hoarding additional data or making sense of it? Make sure you're not mindlessly adding apples and oranges. Add variables together with cause, and look for patterns beneath the surface.

I'm really excited about Scout Labs and Lithium joining forces, largely due to their stellar casts of characters. Jenny Zeszut, Margaret Francis, and Jochen Frey at Scout Labs; Joe Cothrel and Michael Wu at Lithium all are enlightened minds I always learn from. Congratulations to all of you!

Your customers are indeed everywhere and you need to be as well. My colleague, Peter Kim is hosting a webinar on this today. Join him as he shares his observations on social media trends and the market factors driving businesses’ need for expanded customer intelligence over the Social Web, Wednesday 5/19 at 3CT/4ET.

I'm anticipating a lot more creative moves in the listening space in the near future. Just be wary of the basics before you identify your new Social CRM provider.

I'm back!

2010-02-28T16:14:00.007-06:00

I'm a little out of practice, having been gone for the past 2 months on maternity leave. I haven't been blogging, and only infrequently tweeting. But that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about social business. As the folk wisdom goes, sometimes taking a step back gives you a fresh POV.

One of the best perspectives I got came from the worst part of my maternity leave: a 3 day stint at the Children's Hospital, where they had the most impressive analytic dashboards.

In the pediatric ICU there are monitors everywhere, with all the right real-time analytics. At first, I was in awe of the gold 'standardness' of it all - they know exactly what to look at to monitor the health of their patients. One dip or rise and the alarms sound. If only we knew the equivalent of heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature in social business...

But what I learned is, even when you've got the right metrics, it's still complicated. So as you continue to chase the holy grail of business metrics, here are some things to think about.

Don't set thresholds too aggressively. The monitor in our room buzzed all the time. Initially, I panicked each time. Inevitably, a nurse would come in and turn it off. No exam necessary. No big deal. They had set the thresholds for various measures as early warning signals- the beeping wasn't really cause for concern. Eventually I learned to ignore it. When your metrics aren't calibrated to levels that require action, it leads to non-response.

Connect your sensors to the right surface (think: people, department, products). My son's blood pressure gauge was on his ankle. With any kicking, the monitor was overcome with noise. He kicked all the time. Again, I endured the meaningless beeping and worse, an eye-opening flatline would appear on the monitor. The signal was great when it worked, but it was hard to read patterns over time with so much missing data. If you want your signal to come in loud and clear, be sure you're accessing a reliable location.

Single measures mean little in isolation. Each of the measures monitored was a very strong indicator, but never did movement in one call for action. Action was the result of a configuration of activity across measures, over time, and as a result of consensus across nurses and doctors. Here was the biggest lesson: 'metrics that matter' actually means more than identifying the right metrics, the holy grail-- it's about finding the ones that act in concert to yield something meaningful, having the right people monitoring them, and instituting the right processes for crisis response.

Now, this is NOT a critique of the medical practice. This particular hospital had it down- they knew exactly how to 'listen' to their dashboards. Having internalized tactics like the above, they knew exactly when to intervene.

This is, instead, a lesson about valuing what it is that you're currently measuring. The right metrics will come; for now, make sure you're making the most of your current dashboards.

More to come!

Awaiting Igon Valuation

2009-11-20T10:15:00.001-06:00

In Steven Pinker’s eloquent review of Gladwell’s new collection of essays, he coins a new calamity - “the Igon Value Problem,” mocking Gladwell for his misunderstanding/ misspelling of the term “eigenvalue” as igon value. The Problem, as defined by Pinker is,

when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Now, I’m laughing all the way home, believe me, but I’m concerned that our industry is one that is fueled by Igon Valuation. Is it not true that there’s a deep hunger for sweeping generalizations in lay speak? A thirst for buzzy buzz words to capture compelling psychological constructs? Isn’t that essentially what industry analysts are lionized for?

My concern is that this Problem is keeping answers at bay. There are solutions available to some of today’s more complex business problems, but they’re waiting to be "Igon-valued" before catching on. Take the measurement of social technology usage, for example.

Meanwhile, academics are often brought on to firms with fear-- left in the back room, lest they promise to dumb down everything they’re thinking of uttering client-side.

I too have criticized Gladwell for his banal generalizations, for his cursory foray into psychology and statistics, for somehow stealing the credit for entire literatures-- but I'm constantly reminded that Gladwell is hailed as a business guru! His books are on the business best seller lists for months, years.

I’ve come to the conclusion that business wants things Igon Valued. In a recent embarrassment at Web 2.0. Expo NYC, danah boyd was publicly humiliated for speaking too densely, quickly, and smartly... I used to think it was compelling stories about data that were lacking, but I’ve now decided banal generalizations are more effective. Please tell me I’m wrong.

I think the essence of business problems are waiting to be solved by a combination of social network analysis (SNA), text analysis, and some good, old-fashioned, proper attention to human beings-- not all things that have been here all along, but things that are readily accessible now.

By measuring connections through SNA, we can identify things like:

who’s connected to whom in an organization, however informal those connections are.
the roles people play in communication and collaboration - whether they’re information brokers, originators, or hoarders (alas, a potential opportunity to make blatant generalizations!)

Through text analysis, we can determine things like:

the nature of signals exchanged-- when work is really getting done as opposed to socialization!
how honest or emotional colleagues are with one another

Through asking the right questions on surveys, we can:

explore perceptions of trust, motivation, awareness, competition
help validate the root cause of any given problem

Compare today's business intelligence to what Dr. Dena Rifkin wrote recently of how our medical interventions -- our attention to “benchmarks and checkboxes” are failing the patients:

As a profession, we are paying attention to the details of medical errors — to ambiguous chart abbreviations, to vaccination practices and hand-washing and many other important, or at least quantifiable, matters.

This too is true in business-- we’re paying attention to quantifiable units because they’re there, buzzy concepts because we want to keep up with the Jones’.

Be wary of buzz words. Certainly there are outliers, flukes, and things you can accomplish without methodical, long-winded statistical pattern analysis or reasoning, but for the most part, some depth is necessary. Furthermore, means to the depth already exists -- we’re not waiting for it to be figured out, just waiting for it to be popularized.

Also posted on Dachis Group Collaboratory which you can subscribe to here

Three masquerades of metrics

2009-11-03T11:38:00.002-06:00

Below is an excerpt of a post I wrote for our Collaboratory today. Curious to hear readers' thoughts on measurement flaws and opportunities in the social space. Please find the full post here.

[There are three major opportunities that could help unlock the value of conversations and other social interactions. But first, we have to overcome some very basic human tendencies:

the ease of counts
the shine of the surface
the convenience of snapshots.

We need to abandon some traditional standards and stop forcing social data into shapes and sizes that work for other media measurement. Tomorrow is about patterns, depth, and dynamic metrics.]

Reflections on Reflections on Working in Public

2009-10-19T08:01:00.002-05:00

When we launched our Collaboratory, I mentioned that it's part web presence, part social business experiment. For now, the most experimental part is the window on our work-- a live stream of communication acts our team engages in, offering up varying degrees of information from having shared an unnamed file on a particular platform to emailing someone at a certain domain to tweeting specific, visible content.

There are massive individual differences in comfort with transparency. As my team has spent the past few weeks sussing out the comfort zone with the public now privy to the stream, we've reflected on, discussed, and critiqued our perceptions. We're very curious what it's like on the other side of the window... What do you think about our transparency? Too much? Not really that much? Want more?

Transparency can have a profound effect on behavior. Perhaps not a universal effect. Ironically, the psych study that comes to mind is an old great of Ken Gergen's: Deviance in the Dark (Gergen, Gergen, & Barton, 1973). Gergen was exploring the effect of darkness on behavior. He had students enter a dark room one-by-one, to get to know each other. He provided very few instructions. They chatted, talked more heatedly, and then... eventually the study was called off because it led to some scandalous and unexpectedly affectionate behaviors! Not aggressive ones, as might have been expected.

I bring this up because of what we know from this and several other studies on deindividuation, or not being able to see or pay attention to individuals as individuals (the opposite of transparency). Deindividuation doesn't necessarily make you aggressive or affectionate, it's a powerful force in making people conform to a perceived norm. This has really interesting implications for transparency in the workplace, especially for leaders and norm-setters. Transparency may not have a single effect - be it competition or collaboration; authenticity or artifice. Read how it's affected my colleagues over the past few weeks and let us know what you think.

Dachis Group Social Business Technology Alliances

2009-10-12T08:05:00.001-05:00

Another week, another announcement: today, about our Social Business Technology Alliance program.

With such a wide spectrum of social business needs, it's important to have the flexibility to solve the problem at hand and not shoe-horn an organization into an uncomfortable platform. It should be clear by now that at Dachis Group, we believe technology is part of the overall solution; I typically write about the necessary culture and process-related changes we believe in and practice. Today, we're excited to welcome our technology partners to our ecosystem to help deliver comprehensive solutions.

Our technology and integrator partners include:

Atlassian Confluence - Wiki-based collaboration
CoTweet - Twitter for business
IBM Lotus Connections - Enterprise social networking tools
Telligent - Customer and enterprise facing communities
ThoughtFarmer - Social intranet software
SocialWare - Social Media risk management
Socialcast - Enterprise microblogging and social networking platform
Photon Infotech - Open Source Development
Bamboo Networks - Custom application development and rehabilitation
Starpoint Solutions - Application implementation and integration

Read the official release on our Collaboratory.

Social should imply specificity

2009-10-07T09:09:00.002-05:00

[This was originally posted on the Dachis Group Collaboratory]

There’s an inherent problem with the word social. Not “social media” or “social business.” Just social. The problem is, it doesn’t incorporate any sense of specificity to it. People are left to think that all things social are massive connectivity festivals. Really, being social is about connecting with sensible, specific others, typically, for specific reasons.

It’s great to open things up and give people freedom, but specificity-- that is, some focus or structure- is what really unleashes talent. Specificity comes in many forms of social systems. As Tom Malone et al. point out, the “genome” of collective intelligence can be broken down into Who (staffing), What (goal), Why (incentives), and How (process). Each of these "genes" demand specificity.

Take the Netflix Challenge, for one: its success as a crowdsourced effort was attributed to connecting the right people only after some jockeying happened. It was not a result of all participants being connected, helter-skelter. Often throwing too many people into the mix leads to hasty and irrational outcomes due to groupthink or lazy free-loading, as a result of social loafing -- not to mention pluralistic ignorance where we incorrectly assume acceptance of a given norm.

A less oft-cited method of making a social system work has less to do with who is connected and more to do with what you ask of those connections. This is a critical focus as researchers migrate from surveys as our mainstay methodology. Good questions are the currency of social systems that flow between the focused connections discussed above.

The other day I noticed Rypple made an important change in this direction with its “Power of One” initiative. Rypple, as you might know, lets you give and receive feedback online (anonymously), to and from select others. All humans lack an inherent sense of psychometrics, so it’s hard to know precisely what to ask, especially when the stakes are high. That is, you’re asking *specific* trusted others for self-related feedback. The inclination is to ask open-ended questions. Logic being similar to the above: connect everyone // ask people to tell you anything and any number of things. Turns out, lack of specificity leads to confusion, and in most cases non-response. Rypple is alleviating this problem by encouraging users to ask “what’s *one thing* I can do to improve.”

It’s usually one question that makes or breaks a given finding. Gallup’s one question, “Do you have a best friend at work” is the biggest predictor of workplace engagement. Other research shows that one question self-assessments of health are better predictors of mortality than an extensive battery of objective health data. Reicheld told us six years ago that your Net Promoter score is “The One Number you Need to Grow.”

My point is not about measurement error and response bias, it’s about specificity. Being direct in order to make social systems effective. Finding the signal amidst the noise.

We can't go on idly talking about "social" initiatives. We must be focused in order to make social systems effective. This pertains to who is in your ecosystem, how they are connected, why they are connected, and how you measure those connections.

Being social is not necessarily complex. If you apply a lens of specificity, you can systematically simplify the situation.

Lab, Sweet Home(page)

2009-10-05T10:05:00.002-05:00

Today we launch our laboratory on social business design: The Collaboratory.

It’s a work in progress, and today is the first step. When you arrive, you’ll notice a window on our world of work: a live stream of our communication-- sharing files, yamming, tweeting, and yes, emailing, since no one is perfect yet.

The Collaboratory moonlights as our web presence, offering more information about our company, curating readings about social business design, and eventually inviting clients to engage with us in social business. Rather than making it a static repository of knowledge, we’re testing out new ways to make it more dynamic and blur the lines of transparency and other notions, previously standards of how business has been done.

My favorite aspect of it is its experimental nature, so please participate and help us turn it into something really interesting. We've also posted our first piece of thought leadership, available for download. I hope this stimulates millions of questions from you, particularly about the interface of social science and business; I encourage you to engage, question, critique, comment. We've been thinking about these concepts for just over a year now and are excited to open our doors and engage with our ecosystem.

Think culture change, not brainwashing...

2009-09-28T06:00:00.005-05:00

You might laugh, but as I’ve been thinking about the culture change associated with social business design, I’m reminded of the literature on coercive persuasion, aka brainwashing, in its ugliest form.

Only brainwashing has such negative connotations. Abandon those. The part I’m thinking about, the systematic methodology to get people to change their attitudes to drastically different ones, is not necessarily evil.

I know it seems strong - or wrong - to compare culture change to brainwashing, but building the new collaborative culture we’re talking about takes a lot of work. Unless, of course you’re just asking people to use social technologies and not genuinely change their ways, their attitudes, their business processes.

Most people aren’t-- they’re asking how we get hierarchical, silo-d, and competitive cultures to change to more democratic, participative, or hiveminded ones.

Enter “thought reform” methodology from reputable psychologists like Edgar Schein or Robert Jay Lifton, as deduced from extreme situations like American POWs in the Korean war. Of course, it requires slight adaptation to be more relevant to an organizational setting.

The POW brainwashing tactics were complex, but there are three major phases that are typically identified. Keep in mind, in the case of the POWs, which I don’t for a second endorse a direct analog to employees of corporate life, it was all about breaking down identity through abuse, starvation, isolation, sleep deprivation, etc.. Rather than breaking down who you are, I’ve adapted the process to be about how you work. I’ve also removed the need for undue conditions (managers take note).
 A loose adaptation: simplified steps to "induce" culture change:  

Break it down.

While you don’t need to begin by attacking “wrong,” or unsocial ways, question current definitions and ways of working. Get all assumptions and beliefs on the table. In the coercive settings, here's where captors figure out what they're working with and build a foundation for change. Use caution here-- the emphasis is on questioning old ways, not mandating new ones. The anxiety you can provoke here could backfire if you aren't supportive and consistent.

Provide a glimmer of hope.

As people, we’re full of biases that limit us to seeing and using things in the usual, traditional ways. Offer alternatives. Start with seemingly innocent pilots-- nothing back-breaking. Talk about the purpose behind the ways of old so you can rebuild strategically and not just address features. One of the more effective tactics used in POW coercion was to put newbies in groups with others who were more advanced, or further down the road in the desired change. They offered a comfortable model of tactical next steps.

Rebuild the new, social employee.

With a blank slate to work from, here’s where the vision comes in. The key here is introducing a new belief system, not just a new feature set. In coercive version, here’s where "the right way" is introduced, and is radically different from ways of old [Note: here's where it's introduced, not in stage 1, but in the final stage]. The trick here is to provide a completely new framework. Recall how easy it is to fall back on what we know; here, you have to go out of your way to offer up new ways to think about things.

Again, drastically oversimplified, but in my mind, remarkably instructive when thinking about genuine change.

Dachis Group Ecosystem Expansion

2009-09-02T07:00:00.004-05:00

 
As my readers will agree, when you hear someone talking about successful strategies to share hidden data and drive collective intelligence, you can’t help but be endeared. Throw a picture of Madonna into the same presentation (re: adoption challenges) and your interest skyrockets, no? Such was the case when I first heard Lee Bryant eloquently present on transition strategies for E2.0 adoption.

Lee is the co-founder and director of Headshift, a company that we, the Dachis Group, excitedly announce today we have acquired. Headshift is a leader in the space who understands that social business is a new way of working, not just the use of new technology. Headshift, like us, realizes that organizations today need socially calibrated ideas and tools, and most importantly, strong strategy to implement them.

We believe global organizations will evolve their participation in social media into social business. When this happens, integration, scale, and adoption will become complex issues that can only be solved with a solid strategic foundation: social business design. Social business design is a systematic, comprehensive approach that spans three core areas: optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation.

These three areas of business present ripe opportunities for improved outcomes such as cost savings, new product/service innovations, and increased revenue streams. These outcomes occur when organizations connect and expand their ecosystems, evolve toward a more open culture, and empower employees, business partners and customers to actively participate in their business.

Our acquisition of Headshift will allow us to service the increasing demand for global organizations to become social businesses. It will also allow us to attract the best talent internationally, create our own global, collaborative culture and do the absolute best work in this space. Headshift has done extensive work in Professional and Legal Services, Consumer Products, Media and Publishing, Health Care, and Government; and, worked with global companies including AXA, British Petroleum, and the BBC.

I’m excited to expand our ecosystem to include Headshift as collaborators to help global organizations (and organisations) become social businesses. I’m also particularly eager to drink virtual tea with my new colleagues overseas. Welcome, Headshift!

For more information:

The official press release for this news can be found here.
For more on the Dachis Group and our services, visit our company site and follow us on Twitter.

My colleagues' perspectives on our expansion can be found on their blogs:

marking your social media territory

2009-08-24T09:57:00.011-05:00

The other night, at Parents' night, the teacher explained how 2-3 year-old kids are really into the idea of "guarding." He proceeded to give me a handful of pebbles my son had asked him to "guard" that very day. Of course, after a brief moment of inexplicable pride, my immediate instinct was to question how I've raised him to be so territorial.

Then I realized he's far from alone; he's probably a social media maven in-the-making.

Our social media behavior obviates how territorial we all are. Take hashtags on Twitter. What better way to say "guard this idea"? RT-ing, in this vein, is yet another defense mechanism-- that is, defending your intellectual territory. It's a way to show your association with an idea, if not partially own it. What about the race to pagerank? It's all about marking territory. Is oversharing yet another tactic? Increasing the probability that you'll be rewarded with authority, influence, and other forms of credit for any number of potential memes...

To me, hashtags on Twitter epitomize the idea of territory-marking. They seem inherently different from tags in other media, e.g. blogs. I have a feeling our hashtagging motivations go deeper than the universal need to classify and develop a taxonomy. There's something subversive and blatant about the ownership motive there. Maybe the ephemeral nature of Twitter encourages us to hoard more intensely than a longer-form, more enduring medium.

Could the sheer scale and fast-growing nature of social media bring out this territorial instinct in all of us? It reminds me of the drastically different behavior we show when primed with mortality salience. I remember one study where men rated wholesome women to be more attractive than promiscuous ones when primed with their own mortality. I wonder if we use more hashtags when Twitter volume is particularly high-- as a strategy to manage the noise. This would be a nice microcosm of the increased territory-marking that seems to be going on as communication - messages and media -- proliferates.

We've long known that unpredictability and lack of control compel us to make our mark. When my son asks his teacher to guard things, he clearly perceives risk in losing them. Preservation and ownership claims make sense for the uncertainty that is life at age 2. If we, however, perceive a loss of control in social media, we might need to conjure up better strategies to establish order.

Photo credit: Mrs. Logic on Flickr

SXSWi: voting is live

2009-08-18T09:52:00.004-05:00

My hockey coach once told me you should always vote for yourself. If you have any hesitation, you shouldn't play, run for leadership positions, or in this case, submit ideas.

In light of his sage advice, I wanted to ever so unhumbly show you what my team has submitted to SXSWi 2010, each of which I've confidently voted for. Take a look and see what you think. There are many, many other (2k+) great-looking submissions well worth checking out prior to September 4th.

We'd appreciate your consideration.

Social Business By Design (David Armano)

Description: The hype around social media has become deafening. Organizations are feeling pressured to "join the conversation” or risk being irrelevant. However, a “social business” has to be designed from the ground up and the top down in order to achieve transformation which scales. Are we ready to move beyond lip service?

Will address: What is "social business design"? Why is this important to me? What implications does social business design have for my organization? Why do I need a "social business strategy"? What technologies are relevant? How will this help me with my current social business initiatives? What should I be measuring? Why is this different from what I'm doing now? How will advancements in cloud computing, open source, and mobile factor? Where do I start?

Sponsored Conversations: Good Strategy or Spam? (Peter Kim)

Description: Does sponsored social media content work? When it comes to pay-for-play, many bloggers see no issue with “sponsored conversations” and point out that it’s happened for years. Others decry this practice as payola and challenge the credibility of those who accept payments. Who’s right?

Will address: Should marketers support sponsored conversations? Do bloggers undermine their credibility by accepting payments? Will the FTC ruling have a material impact on this practice? How are large consultancies advising their blue chip clients on this issue? How do well-known bloggers see an impact on their approach? What standards should bloggers adhere to, especially vis-a-vis journalists? Can paying for conversation deliver unbiased content? Does this work as a form of advertising? From those who have participated, what's the ROI of sponsored conversations? Is this an inevitable trend, as Forrester claims? If so, how big will it get?

Stop the Insanity: Making Sense of the Social Web (me)

Description: As social technologies become woven into our lives, our breadcrumbs become more varied and dimensional. Making sense of this information is challenging- for users and marketers. Methods from social and personality psychology are potential antidotes. Enough with pages views to demonstrate value. How can analysis account for the rich depth of data?

Will address: How, besides traditional web analytics, can you demonstrate the value of social technology? Why is everyone obsessed with Influence and Engagement-- does either construct have any merit? What is a good framework to use when thinking about data available through social technology? Which constructs matter when you're "listening" online? As users, how can we make sense of the information we give and receive about ourselves everyday? Are there better ways to present myself online? Quicker ways to perceive others? What can you really know about someone based on their profile, blog, or tweets? What do marketers currently know about us, based on our online communication? What can social scientists tell us about social media? Are there any ways for marketers to go beyond buzz levels and sentiment?

Potential panelists: Jonathan Carson - co-founder, BuzzMetrics; President International, Nielsen Online; Daniel Debow - co-founder, co-CEO Rypple; Sam Gosling - University of Teaxas at Austin Personality psychologist and author of Snoop: What your stuff says about you

Hopefully see you in Austin soon. And if we do get in, be sure to Tweet precisely!

Slow down: you appear to have a Socially Transmitted Disease

2009-08-13T00:09:00.005-05:00

Peter Kim, coiner of terms such as the headfake and other online gems asked me about STDs: Socially Transmitted Diseases.

We seem to all have different strands (memes?) of these STDs. My Sunday Styles folk will recall this is why Michael Malice developed Protocols, "fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled."

But there's more to it. It's cliche to suggest we're excessively social because we can be. Insert stale joke here about someone blogging while you're disclosing a deep, dark secret, tweeting while they're eating breakfast, or Jeff Jarvising your customer service... STDs are multidimensional beasts. Gone are the days where attention, narcissism, or reputation-management drove our online behavior.

We're addicted to accruing followers and engaging with that community so much so that 2-hours of down-time on Twitter leads to fearful outcries that "social media is standing still"

We're reinforced by the ability to cleanse our stream, for example getting huge rushes of adrenaline when you tap into the new ease of hiding irrelevant, yet active-sharers on Facebook.

Dare I intervene with catchy labels for these STDs Engagamydia? Signaliasis?

Pete reminded me of the depression of unconfirmed friend requests and the exhilarating "whoosh" of sending an email on Mac Mail. Amazing how these new behaviors are toying with our brain chemistry...

Sometimes we need to remember that social technology is actually enabling our organic, social instincts, not transforming us into a new breed of monsters. Remember: we're social animals. We strive to get along and get ahead, it's only natural to get excited about the increased amplification of our signals.

But like a pretty girl in college, take your time to develop and manage your ecosystem. Social media is a vehicle for social behavior, more Sedan than DeLorean.

Social Business Design: a social psychologist's take

2009-06-22T05:22:00.004-05:00

If a social psychologist were to design a business, as an experiment of course, she would take all the information she knows about a) person b) environment and c) their interaction and design a system to account for it all.

Aware of people's fundamental need to belong, she might conceive of the organization as a vast network of groups; understanding differences in culture, and cultural perceptions, she might afford a more collective orientation by priming team goals and rewarding participation; knowledgeable about interpersonal dynamics she might enable real-time communication and meta-communication to promote team awareness and smooth interactions; lastly, with a deep knowledge of statistics as the backbone of social science, she would empower participants with individual methods of making sense of information and would constantly measure any changes.

With good Gestalt, the sum of these parts would equal greater than the whole. That is, each one of those four maneuvers would lead to incremental differences, leveraging more people to communicate more fluidly. Together, these would lead to emergent outcomes - new ideas, new directions, unexpected, unforeseen results.

For the past nine months plus, my colleagues and I have been building a business not too dissimilar from this. Specifically we've been figuring out what it takes to design a social business.

In the image above, you'll start to get a sense of the four cornerstones, or archetypes of Social Business Design:

Ecosystem - a community of connections
Hivemind - the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
Dynamic Signal - the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
Metafilter- a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise

Social Business Design, although new terminology, is rooted in much of the classic thinking about how naturally social we are. It's newly possible because of advances in technology that now support our social ways. It's timely, given changes in work and society, like globalization and our expectations to be intimately involved in various business decisions.

I'm part of a team that's building a social business of our own, to help others design theirs. We've developed consultative and technology implementation services to do so.

We've been working with a few clients already, helping them solve pieces of the overall social business equation. We've also been sharing pieces of our vision over the past few months: Jeff, here; Pete, here; Jevon, here; David, here; and I do, here; although we haven't officially launched or named ourselves yet.

Today, each of my colleagues and I are sharing our perspectives on the gestalt: Social Business Design:

If you want to know more, tune into our panels this week at Enterprise 2.0, livestreamed, with chat. If you're in Boston for E 2.0 and want to talk more about Social Business Design, especially the measurement side of things, shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

consistency, connectivity, and consequences

2009-06-11T08:10:00.002-05:00

When consistency and connectivity are at odds, it seems particularly paradoxical.

A while back, the NY Times ran an article about taking advantage of the anonymity of text messaging to help teens get sex education. One of the sex ed volunteers interviewed pointed out the importance of consistency.

"In offering this service to teenagers, he said, “you can’t say ‘I’ll be honest except or until.’ ” That’s often what happens with parents, he added, “when the child brings up something shocking, the parents tend to shut down.”

This is often what happens in business, actually. Particularly when it comes to connectivity: You can connect in this way (e.g. Outlook), but not this way (e.g. Facebook)…

Ironically, the article concluded with the idea that help, as offered through this service, stops at connectivity.

"I don’t want them to feel connected to me,” she said, “because I’m never going to be real to them. I’m a texter. I want them to find someone real to talk to.”

It makes me question the more literal sense of connection people have through technology and whether its dependent on the possibility of “real” connections.

Beyond services like Match.com or meetup.com which have explicit goals of live connections, we know virtual worlds can be deeply emotional, whether or not you go to the Second Life Community Convention. I’ve experienced firsthand how certain flow applications can give you an awareness of your team you can’t have in the office. Neither of these happen in anticipation of live communication.

But then time and again you read about virtual relationships coming to fruition – the fulfillment, closure, and surprises.

Sandy Pentland’s research illustrates the differential value of face-to-face vs. email communication. Whereas email is optimized for brainstorming, face to face is required for integration and decision-making. Is this another way of saying connectivity without live consequence leads to limited intimacy?

Can we fully achieve the leverage of mass connectivity without a sense of consequence? Does consequence better afford consistency?

Straddling

2009-05-22T16:26:00.003-05:00

Despite an unruly travel schedule, I was refreshed by my brief visit at ICWSM (International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media) where Sam Gosling and I gave a workshop on The Psychology of Social Media. Sam introduced me as someone who straddles psychological research and applied social media, hence the title of my post.

ICWSM, is exceptional in being able to use the term social media sans baggage. That alone was refreshing; as was the unique mix of people at the conference, all with hands on various vectors of social media, if you will. As Matt Hurst says,

These include: text mining, artificial intelligence (especially NLP/CompLing), psychology, graph algorithms, social network theory, data visualization/UI design and data mining. One of the major roles and purposes of the conference is to bring these areas together to better model, support and leverage social media.

Sam and I framed the workshop with the question: "What can psychology tell us about the production and consumption of social media?"

Our talk began with the idea that all social media is created and consumed by psychological beings, beings with "psychologies" that evolved long ago. Naturally then, successful social media should tap into these basic needs. Businesses too, I would argue.

Whenever people talk about psychological needs, they immediately think Maslow. While his hierarchy is intuitively appealing, empirically it hasn't exactly panned out. It's always interesting to me what has and has not leaked out of psychology. Gladwell aside, could good visualizations be predictive?

The framework of needs Sam and I chose to talk about comes from Robert Hogan, a personality psychologist whose ideas are rooted in evolutionary adaptation. You've heard about our "Stone Age minds' before... Gist is: we've always lived in groups and our groups have always had status hierarchies. So, our main psychological motivations are (a) to get along and (b) t0 get ahead. This results in us:

Wanting to know others; and,

Wanting to be known by others (as Sam's research shows, sometimes).

Sam discussed his research on personality perception based on Facebook profiles, websites, bedrooms, and offices; and I talked about my research defining personality with everyday behaviors and language. We both agree, one of the more interesting questions that stems from all this research is what do you need to know in order to really know someone? And now, how much of this do we get in social media? Is anything systematically missing?

Understanding psychological needs is important in designing a system, well beyond the UX. Thanks to groups like ICWSM, we can advance in applying information about how psychological information is conveyed and made sense of, at a systemic level- whether we're designing an application or a business.