The business problem that sentiment analysis solves is informing a manager, at a glance, not of only of the tone and vibe that his own employees are sending out there, but also how the public is responding to the policies and practices of the company in question.

Can’t you do this qualitatively? Well sure – if you didn’t have the anchor-and-adjust function in your head, it would be just fine. And ‘normally’ functioning humans all suffer from the curse of anchor-and-adjust.

The second business problem that effective sentiment analysis solves is the measurement-optimization problem in social analytics. The Coles Notes goes like this: “how can you possibly optimize if your measuring stick isn’t consistently accurate (or consistently inaccurate?)”. Because of anchor-and-adjust and normal human bias, how can human coding ‘correct’ anything consistently? Of course, it isn’t a business problem that anybody is really aware of – even to this day, most web analysts are unaware that a shifting cookie retention curve is messing with their KPI’s.

Anyway, there are real business problems to be solved there.

The purpose of market segments vary depending on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a marketing science analyst, they should tell you that the purpose of a market segment is to use variations in self-referential communities to adjust the marketing message (positioning)  so that it is more relevant to a particular audience, ultimately resulting in higher profits for the business.

Put another way, a market segment should, ideally, impart empathy in quantitative marketing design.

Personas are traditionally the product of qualitative insights.

Market segments are traditionally the product of quantitative insights.

Institutionally, neither side really wants to listen to each other. (In fact, it’s hard enough to get Data Miners to even come out to Web Analytics Wednesdays – and Web Analysts are quants!). Culture and jargon matters.

I don’t believe that Market Segments, as they’re being done today by most of the major companies, are really imparting any empathy in marketing design. They produce 120 cells of variations and walk away – what is a copywriter supposed to do with that? But they could be upgraded and improved to do so.

I believe that Personas are sometimes effective at producing empathy in design. I’ve sat in enough Creative meetings to know that it’s effective. Humans being humans though, Personas don’t always work: I’ve read case studies where the ultimate design had nothing to do with the personas.

What’s ultimately needed is a third type of product: a hybrid of personas and market segments. Of course, that’s blasphemy to both sides of the community. Quals and IA’s would rightly freak out. Quants and Data Miners would rightly freak out. Sure, there are differences in the techniques and purposes of both – but I see more overlap between the two having sat on both sides of the fence.

It’s normally a very good day. As with anything, the 80/20 rule applies to it.

We have a town hall, where a member of the executive comes and presents. It’s actually really good. When I started out as an analyst, the only time I was ever really fully brought up to speed (I felt) was during these presentations. Things have long since changed for Marketing Science folk.

Then there’s some component of field trip or activity fun. Those are always fun.

And then there’s an evening of more fun – typically featuring Captain Morgan.

What I value most is getting to really talk to people from the other offices. So often, they’re voices on the phone, and very often, you’re not exactly meeting under nice circumstances (they’re calling for a reason, and typically there’s distress involved). In sum, it’s nice to see people in person and listen to what pains them. And then fun to have fun.

The essential fact is that who you market to, over time, and how you market it, changes over time. I have many friends who are true “innovators” and I know a few people who are impostors. (They really don’t have a business problem to solve, but they would like to see a desired solution set be imposed on people, even if it doesn’t produce any value.) Innovators believe everything should be free, and rightfully so, since they’re working on improving the product. Many of my friends in this category behave more like actuarial industry insiders than anything else. There’s such a brutal rate of survival that’s involved here.

Early adopters are dreamers with moneybags. They want to push the technology to realize some sort of massive breakthrough. They’re good people with rational intentions. But they’re impossible to satisfy in the long run.

Then there’s the Chasm.

I affectionately refer to certain group behaviors as being ‘sheeple’. It applies in marketing. The overriding goal is to get a majority of some small herd to go your way. Once that critical majority is on board, you can move into other markets and gain a majority. Hot majority on majority action leads to getting into the Early Majority. It’s typically during the Early Majority that imitators catch on and start competing for market share (though, sometimes that does happen as one is crossing the Chasm), and the prices start to come down. The social technology around the product becomes better and more effecient, firms compete on price, inputs become commoditized, and finally the Late Majority comes on in. Laggards lag, and in general, we don’t talk much about them.

I only bring this up because I’m living through one chasms right now and in a few short months I’ll be entering another one. On my left are only a very small subset of innovators who can relate, in some small way, to what it’s like. On my right are wait-and-see pragmatists. There are so few people who have actually crossed the chasm successfully. Success is so vanishingly rare.

It’s the true test, isn’t?

At this point I’m happy for the opportunity and assuming success.

The Coles notes of that compact volume is:

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful”.

Wonderful.

Thanks Malcolm!

A clusterfuck can be turned around by either boosting trust, hitting ‘reset’ when it comes to definitions, deliberately seeking out extra understanding, or, if there’s a hollow core of authority – electing a leviathan to run the group.

Clusterfuck avoidance is going to be a major social technology as knowledge worker teams become increasingly interdisciplinary. More problems are bound to happen because the complexity in terms of communication and the specifics of professional norms scales. Just as an example, if a chemist tells the engineer that temperatures from the mix could trough at -200 c, and asks the engineer if the structure could be designed to handle that – the engineer could choose take the question badly. The engineer could take the question as a professional afront: of course she’d check the temperature as part of the normal procedure of being an engineer, and resents the implication that they’re incompetent. Or, the engineer might appreciate the question, the -200 c might raise important points, and the engineer might use the opportunity to ask more questions about the nature of the resulting liquid.

The engineer has the choice to respond in a positive way and to propogate good will and further trust, or, the engineer has the choice to hold a grudge and start clamming up.

We can architect teams and tailor our cultural norms to avoid clusterfucks, and it would be well worth the effort.

Next week I’ll move onto another topic series.

Stalin is said to have purposely given his cabinet conflicting portfolios to paralyze them: essentially giving him a free hand to denounce them and go about doing what we wanted to anyway. We have all observed similar situations where very brilliant people will purposely ask a team of people, none of whom have the authority to make any lasting decisions, to execute some task. Even if communication is good and trust exists among the participants, the very nature of the power vacuum is bound to cause a clusterfuck unless the team anoints an interim leviathan. It’s exceedingly rare.

It is entirely possible that some people don’t know that they go about creating such power vaccuums, but it’s hard to believe that they continue going through life without picking up on why they can’t get anything done.

Very frequently, professionals in a given field will begin using a very specific jargon. For instance, the term “unique” means something very different to a web analyst than it does to a fashion designer. These shortcuts in language serve a really important purpose within a profession, and the specificity and unity on that jargon is a key feature of any given culture.

When two professions need to work together, in an inter-disciplenary way, it is very easy to miscommunicate important findings, purely through mistakes in language. Sometimes, something as simple as messing up the difference between ‘pageviews’, ‘visits’, ‘visitors’ and ‘unique visitors’ can have massive impacts on perceptions.

At the root of many clusterfucks is not the unwillingness to communicate, but rather, the relative diffuculty that is involved in communicating.

A good general practice, when presenting anything, is to take the time to ensure that people understand what you’re about to say and why it’s important.

Generally speaking, if there is no trust, there is limited communication (because, of course, refusing to talk to somebody can be a form of limited communication – right?). Even if two respective hierarchies mandate communication, if there is no trust, people on either side will be very crafty in interpreting rules so stringently so as to limit communication. Worse, distrust over years can become pervasive and infectious, like a plaque that builds up. We saw this in the years leading to Air India.

Sometimes there is a legitimate incentivization for distrust. I won’t share competitive information with competitors out of distrust. Sometimes there are just people who have a very different valuation of trust. Trust is like pesos instead of Euros. In environments where trust is so utterly devalued, it would be easy to forecast a high volume of clusterfucks. The difference in exchange rates might make a transaction impossible.

There’s a counter to that, of course -  ‘professionalism’. It sets the expectation that because two people belong to the same overarching institution, regardless if the two individuals trust each other, they trust the overarching institution to actually enforce the rules if one of them cheats. In most cases though, such a leviathan can’t be everywhere all the time, so really, the strengths of such institutions builds up over repeated successes and the rare instances where an executive punishes somebody for breaking the rules.

I suppose just as a country with weak legal institutions really can’t hope to become rich, I wouldn’t expect a company with weak professional institutions to become rich, either.

In sum, trust can be considered a form of social capital and a key factor in preventing a clusterfuck. Where there isn’t any trust, you’ll probably find a clusterfuck.

People in their own way are complex and they form complex systems with complex relationships and complex rituals. How hierarchies form and persist is something a few of us within the Toronto innovation community has been struggling with – especially around this relationship between ‘networks’ and ‘hierarchies’.

Every so often – people can’t or won’t get a long, expectations aren’t communicated or registered, and our complex systems break down.

The specific question is:  “What causes clusterfucks”?

That’s the central question of the week.