Name drop commences:

Attendees included June Li, Maciek Adwent, Jenn Fong-Adwent, Mark Dykeman, Dave Hamel, Glinski, Alex Brasil, Mike Fiorillo, Jose Davilla, Romy Klaus (in from London!), Lida and Mike Sukmanowski, Gar, and the whole Syncapse Measurement Science team – among many others. I counted some 45 attendees at the apogee. Thank you all for making it an excellent evening.

Name drop ends.

There are no stated agendas at these gatherings, only hidden ones. And indeed, I had a chance to talk extensively with Mister Glinski (@glinskiii) about our recent transformations from being such extreme analysts to becoming rounder strategists. I’ve written in this space before about the combination of evidence and product development – specifically about using analytics to make product better. Last night, we expanded on that notion of going beyond a source of proof to becoming a collaborator in the formulation of strategy – to using that skillset to make better products from the outset. That’s a subtle bit of word play – but an important one.

We’ve identified how the path from execution excellence after-the-launch and strategic collaboration before the launch is an ill-charted one. Patrick cut out his own path and is succeeding. I have too.

Such stories will be worth sharing.

This was one of possibly 500 discussions that happened over the course of the night. There was genuine overlap. Thanks all, and let’s continue to talk to one another.

It’s relatively easy for me think of such technologies. Bronze, printing press, and internet are the three that come to mind most easily.

The incremental evidence of benefits is what caused them to be adopted. That adoption, for those benefits, resulted in changes in their behaviour. We generally like to believe for the long-term good, though, for every social action there is a reaction. The environment didn’t benefit from bronze wielding humans too much. Certain factions certainly didn’t benefit from the press. And, ask the RIAA what they think of the internet.

Social internet technologies have enabled the mass expression of an already existing trait in people – the tendency for self-expression. The transference of word of mouth (WOM) from the analog world into the digital world is one of those changing customer behaviours.

As I wrote a few weeks ago on Topic Bearing WOM, a relatively small number of people are generating a large amount of content. The challenge has been to understand a relevant section of it. A very recent technology, twitter, empowers anybody to tell the world a few snippets of what they’re thinking. The result is a massive corpus of information that isn’t processable by a single human being in any meaningful amount of time.

The belief is that by enabling people to understand a large quantity of feedback, they’ll actually be enabled to respond meaningfully to the largest number of people with their limited resources. This would constitute a change in their own behaviour.

Bringing it back – Twitter is a technology which has resulted in a change in customer behaviour. It is not profitable as of yet. It could be in the future. (Lagging revenue S-curve is lagging).

It would be great for the current nest of innovators to think about which behaiours they want to change using technology upfront, and then tailor their technologies and monetization models to that end. Profit isn’t guaranteed, but at least it solves some of the ???? problem.

The invite:

“Developers make it possible to measure anything, statisticians and dataminers work models, IAs finesse interfaces, analysts mash and managers action. Effective Analytics takes an orchestra. Lets talk to each other and see whats possible.”

Historically, WAW’s attract a strong contingent of web analysts, social analysts (many from Syncapse), IA’s, a few dev’s, recruiters, vendors, and yes, two dataminers. And it’s a great mix. Let’s keep that mix and expand it. Additional invites to business strategists, eScientists, Marketing Scientists, and specialized developers.

-George Brown, Legislative Assembly, February 8, 1865