You may or may not have been hearing about a debate going on in web analytics. To most, it might seem like a lot of inside pool. And I suppose most of these things are. I want to talk a little bit about some of that inside pool. Over the course of my WAA Research Committee work last week, I stumbled upon a paper entitled “Assumptions, Explanations, and Prediction in Marketing Science: “It’s the Findings, Stupid, Not the Assumptions” by Eric W. K. Tsang. In it, he replies to a debate that’s been going on for a long time, but what natural scientists had settled a hundred years ago. Richard Staelin back in 1998 said that there’d always be debates[…]
Category: Social Analytics
A tight group of friends will tend to overlap in terms of product adoption and preferences. Like people clump alike. I hypothesize that the social graph is partially-fractal. I use the word ‘hypothesize’ because I don’t have the technology to prove it. Moreover, at this point, I don’t think I could write the proof to prove that it’s partially-fractal. By fractal, I mean that at the most basic level, the individual with a circle of friends, they’re all alike. If you zoom out, treating each group as though it’s a person, they’re all linked together in a similar way, and if you zoom out again, treating each groups of groups…the structure is the same. In other words, the further you[…]
It’s been a busy week in the world of social media measurement, or social analytics, as I like to call it. Anna O’Brien, Marketing Science analyst extraordinaire, wrote a very good post on the topic. Her primary point, enough with the phony people, is polarizing and necessary. The secondary point: social monitoring is not social measuring is also apt and important. My interests like in the measurement side: content analytics and metric analytics. There’s a lot of utility there. A few months ago Joseph Carrabis did a very interesting sentiment analysis on Zappos’ twitter stream. “Tone optimization” will no doubt end up being a major offering sooner rather than later. Let me explain. Optimizing a web campaign can be very[…]
There are major problems with the way that sentiment and intent is presently being measured and reported: you need only scratch the surface a little bit to uncover the grim truth. 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[…]
Clusterfucks will happen, and nobody ever really walks away from one a winner. 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[…]
Another key reason why clusterfucks appear is because somebody with the authority wants them to appear. 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[…]
Sometimes even when people trust each other, information can still get garbled through faults in communication. 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[…]
One of the core reasons for organizational clusterfucks is a lack of trust among the participants or groups of participants. 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[…]
I watched a wonderful Nature last night on PBS. It was about a bunch of baboons on the Serengeti. It was a pretty brutal hour and instructive. 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.
Six key steps in facilitation when you’re trying to heard a group through a problem: Opening: State why you’ve called the meeting, where we’ve come from before, what’s the goal of today’s discussion, and where you hope to go to next. Objective Questions: Ask about the facts and get them on the table. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Reflective Questions: Ask what people are experiencing. Questions like: What ____________ are you experiencing when that happens? Everybody is entitled to feel how they want to feel. Interpretive Questions: The analytical portion of the discussion. Is X >Y? If so why, if not, why not? Decisions Questions: Which ones are high priority? Which are not[…]