Category Archives: Complexity

Please don’t let engineers take charge of the product

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And here’s why, from Douglas Edwards, Google’s brand manager from 1999 to 2005, who’s just written a book about his experience which he relates in this extract from an interview with FastCompany.

I mean, don’t engineers realize that most people run on different ‘software’ than code? And that this human software has its own inherent logic, which is different from the the logic of code?

“User interface was one realm where the communications team and the engineering team met each other halfway. Can you give an example of how you humanized Google?

“Here’s an example: the automated spellchecker. So Google had the capability of detecting if someone’s typed query was likely misspelled.

“The engineers said, ‘Great, if somebody misspells something, we should automatically correct it, do the correct search, and then tell them that they misspelled it, so they know we fixed it.’ The problem was, people don’t generally like to be told they made a mistake.

“The engineers insisted it was essential to tell the user they were wrong, so we launched with wording to that effect. But I knew from a marketing perspective that people would find that abrasive. And people were upset.

“They were pissed off that their search engine was correcting them–especially if they hadn’t made a mistake, if they were searching for a proper name that happened to be unique. Finally we changed it to softer phrasing. [Currently, Google says, “Showing results for...” and then the corrected query.]

“I remember arguing at the time, it doesn’t hurt us to take the blame–a search engine doesn’t have feelings. We should always be willing to take the hit, so the user feels better, even if they know they made a mistake.”

This isn’t a trivial issue when you consider how getting it right can impact on strategy & sales, and especially how you build a customer base. Just the other day I had my own small example of this when I sent out a newsletter with a call to action for the first 20 people who left a post on our Facebook Page Wall – in return for a ‘goody’ bag.

In the end 75 people asked for the giveaway. So are the 55 people who left a request simply to have their request be deleted on the grounds that they should have read the instructions, counted the numbers of posts, and not bothered once the list was 20 in total?

“Do not sell, absolute idiot” – An example of eBay seller feedback from 2005; eBay wisely removed the ability for seller’s to leave negative feedback in 2008.

OK, so coming back to Google, how about something really useful like a 73 page PDF on the best thinking and practice regarding customer engagement online? It’s called the rather cultish name ZMOT (zero moment of truth). So please enjoy – google-zmot

I have already extracted  a few golden nuggets which I’d like to share – ’cause sharing as well as competition is good..

(1) Don’t ask the kind of customer survey question like ‘do you use a smartphone to shop online?’ ask the question ‘do you use a smartphone to help you decide what to buy?’

(2) “Yes, people take the time to leave messages online about how much they love Scotch Tape. That’s because the effort is down to zero.” In other words the full range of products, from the very small to the very large, generate user reviews and content.

I call it Sellotape!

(3) Actually, my third point isn’t from Google’s ZMOT but from the recent Lithium webinar ‘LevelUp Your Facebook Strategy’.

When guest contributor Jeremiah Owyang, in highlighting the 8 key criteria for success, focusing on point 4 around ‘Living authentically’ (what the social networking deal is all about) highlights a key point – that rather than merely emulate your customer’s behaviour online – you should aim to:

“Live in the same behaviors that customers and consumers are.”

Makes sense that being on the same wave length as your customers is going to work well for social media, and for the business bottom line. But as the introduction to the webinar plainly stated, customers have changed with social media and mobile technology but by and large business practice has not. It relates in large part to the follow-on criteria, to enable your customers to do it for themselves, to have discussions without relying on your input.

Quality starts at home!

Let’s face it while there are plenty of experts on the subject of business change in the era of social business how many actually confront what’s really holding things back? Letting go of that ‘elephant on the table’ both internally and externally with employees and customers goes to the heart of the matter, where the potential win is huge but the risks are big too. (Check out this post from Christoph Schmaltz on that subject, and how Headshift approaches these complex issues).

This is why for example in a recent discussion ‘ I had with Phil Bush, director of strategic planning at Oracle, on the possibilities for enterprise use of social tools I focused on the key problem in integrating these transformative technologies in with business processes to drive results. And I’m guessing it’s probably what the CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff was referring to last week at Dreamforce 2011 when he wondered when the first CEO was going to suffer as result of his/her inability to engage using social tools with their customer and employees.

It ain’t easy. But one  tried and tested answer to help employees adapt to new ways of working is the practice of empowerment, which at its simplest as outlined in ‘Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute’ involves three basic principles:

1. Share information with everyone (externally, and internally)
2. Create autonomy through boundaries
3. Replace hierarchical thinking with self-managed teams

OK, sounds that’s one possible answer. But not everyone is convinced, and for good reason – the nature of how knowledge works in a networked world:

“Never mind that there is much rhetoric about the need for leadership at all levels, or about the empowerment and democratization of workers in organization X or Y.  “Performance management, grade levels and compensation have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and in a networked world.”

Despite these objections hope remains so long as there is passion and determination to drive the business forward. Tying the power of consumer and business transformation together using social tools sounds utopian to some, but to others it’s the basis of their disruptive business model, as outlined in the recent Forbes piece ‘Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution’. Referring to HearsaySocial‘s internal social tool set it neatly makes that very link:

“Hearsay’s tools presume something elemental in a world of social power: that the empowerment of employees is directly tied to the empowerment of customers—because they will inevitably end up working, maybe even conspiring, together.”

Sounds like it’s time for action..@stuartgh

To go to the gym, or not?

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Do I go to the gym or not, and how do I decide? I have to take my bike to the station as there is a strike today so maybe that means no to the gym as I’d need to make a long cycle across town from Vauxhall to Bank, to the gym at Tower 42. But then I remember there is another Bannatyne’s Gym at Milbank, which if my memory serves me correctly is not far from Vauxhall. So maybe it would be go to go tonight, after all not many people will be there, because of the strike.

So I then think of how to take my gym gear with me on the short cycle trip to Vauxhall, and think about the extra bulk. Then I remember I need to take my laptop with me as I have it from the weekend. Plus I need to take an extra lock for the bike, and its better to put that in the bag too. And so it seems like it’s not a good idea to go to the gym after all. I can go for a run tonight instead. And go to the gym tomorrow.

And so that’s how I decided whether to go to the gym tonight, or not..

Inception movie explained programmatically

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Inception movie explained programmatically — scrapped off the site by me; constructed by A R Karthick.

This URL has Read-Only access

README

Programmatic representation of the Brilliant movie: INCEPTION by the Genius Director THY name is Christopher Nolan!

My tribute to Nolan in “C” Language and a bit of assembly (x86) as the inception is done using x86 code morphing so that Fischer wakes up thinking that the thought was originated from his mind. Running the program would unravel the entire sequence in the movie. Reading the code would explain the movie Programmatically.

In order to compile the code, just type: “make” And run the code by typing: “./inception” , to see the sequencing in the movie and have the code exit with Fischers Inception thought planted by the Inception team!

-Karthick (a.r.karthick@gmail.com)

Body Wisdom – Interplay of Body and Ego

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‘Body Wisdom – Interplay of Body and Ego’ – new book by Ken Bausch. A few details below..

Body is wiser than Ego.
Ego is cleverer than Body.
When Ego catches Body’s tune, a song happens.
When Ego catches Body’s intuition, magic happens.
An idea is born.

When we focus with our hearts on troubling questions, our unconscious comes through for us. Open questions posed to the unconscious act as the strange attractors of chaos theory. They enable the creative speech of discovery.

In this book, you will explore how your ego rises from your body through language. You will appreciate how the creative thinking enabled by body–ego interplay builds your personality overtime. The personal and social realms you create have remarkable properties. When you understand those properties, you open new vistas for viewing empathy, visions, hallucinations, dreams, and the reality of language. You open new ways to understand objective reality, the reality of religious myths, and even the reality of death.

The motif of most Western thought since the time of Zoroaster and Plato is that we are minds (and souls) trapped within physical bodies. St Augustine reinforced this tradition and Descartes formalized it. The upright man, as symbolized by the stick figure (all head and almost no body) became a standard Western conception.

Nietzsche saw the evil of this conception and protested it loudly. Merleau-Ponty demonstrated that our bodies both know and are known. Freud and Lacan showed how the ego rises from the body through the magic of language. Our bodies are microcosms of the universe and bearers of its unspoken secrets. Holograms, chaos theory, and fractal geometry bear witness.

For more about this book and its blog, go to
www.bodywisdombook.com

How I understand the science of simplicity vs Facebook

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I like to think I understand the relationship between simplicity and complexity as well as this guy because I’ve approached it through people’s understanding of the world from an everyday perspective. Put me to the test and ask a complex question and demand a simple answer? For example how to generate revenue from your online community manager.

Perhaps a useful start to demonstrate the value of simplicity would be to go through Facebook and figure out what does what, such as the privacy controls, and convey that on this blog in a simple way.

But first maybe it’s worth just reading this post from the New York Times on the ‘heterogenous organisation of data’ (nerd dry humour, ey!), that’s Facebook’s privacy options, and Facebook’s response. Then have a read of the practical privacy advice from Fast Company. Before digesting the passionate blog post on this subject from Danah Boyd.

And for balance, on Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective, I turned (in the storeway of WH Smith’s in Leicester Station) to the US edition of Wired Magazine to this choice set of quotes, as part of a piece on hacker culture titled ‘Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists’:

Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have to start from scratch to get control of their machines. “I never wanted to take apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late ’90s, Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level languages, allowing him to concentrate on systems rather than machines.

For instance, when he played with his beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Zuckerberg wouldn’t act out wars with them, like most other kids. He would build societies and pretend the Turtles were interacting with one another. “I was just interested in how systems work,” he says. Similarly, when he began playing with computers, he didn’t hack motherboards or telephones but entire communities — manipulating system bugs to kick his friends off AOL Instant Messenger, for instance.

Like Gates, Zuckerberg is often accused of turning his back on hacker ideals, because he refuses to allow other sites to access the information that Facebook users contribute. But Zuckerberg says that the truth is just the opposite; his company piggybacks — and builds — on the free flow of information. “I never wanted to have information that other people didn’t have,” he says. “I just thought it should all be more available. From everything I read, that’s a very core part of hacker culture. Like ‘information wants to be free’ and all that.”

Ironically as a result of Facebook’s new Community Page feature a new community on hacker culture has been created. And talking of communities – from a community management p.o.v. what this reminds me of is trying to match up role permissions in the admin of a community cms like Drupal to what is good practice for community management in terms of who does what. Now let me admit that this can itself get very complicated, so my sympathies with the privacy team at Facebook. For proof of the complicated nature of this project I recall it felt like a minor achievement when working with one client’s community manager we identified a small error with one specific aspect of a role permission – and then sorted it out ourselves without needing to ‘triage it’ with a developer.

The second reason I know from personal experience of how complicated it is was working on trying to get a good practice matrix of roles and permissions sorted working at SiftGroups. I still have Lawrence Clarke’s words ringing in my head, instructing me to order the allocation of roles to permissions in terms of what roles cannot do, rather than set up by what they can do. Online community roles and permissions and their integration with online community good practice is not easy in other words, but perhaps it can be easier if we can keep it as simple as possible?

On the subject of monetizing your online community, which I’ve also written about recently, I see SiftGroups is holding a great looking workshop on 26 May titled ‘Creating an integrated social media strategy’ which includes a module on that very subject, at the appropriately sounding location of Royal Mint Court in London.

So it appears I’ve moved on from privacy to marketing; for me it’s clear that the new social media marketing mantra is that less control equals more sharing. That’s from marketing guru David Meerman Scott. He should know his passion even got him fired from his corporate job at Thomson’s, but perhaps it’s because he’s also a Grateful Dead fan! But to hear the full story see the webinar below, in which he spells out the new viral rules of the ‘world wide rave’ which also comes in book form too if you’re interested…

Who believes in the 90-9-1 rule?

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A second question on LinkedIn from Dr Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies:

Is there something more accurate and precise than the 90-9-1 rule out there? IMHO, Lorenz Curve and Gini Coefficient. Do you know anything else? The Economics of 90-9-1

My answer as part of yesterday’s Online Community Manager group discussion kind of sums up where I’ve got to after reading Dr Wu’s blog previous post and this latest one:

I like the approach you have using economics-based models. I’ve come at it from a more particpant-observer type sociological point of view, so what I’d like to see is for your analysis to return a new ‘rule of thumb’ based on your in-depth data analysis.

The 90-9-1 rule is useful to community managers because it helps provides a starting point for understanding, as Arantza says above. For example it would be useful to know from a practical point of view whether for more open communities (as opposed to niche market research or project based communities) the 90-9-1 is a useful tool for helping launch a new community.

It’s partly about creating a social dashboard that can explain to a member of senior management why a certain kind of community activity may help or hinder greater participation.

I did this kind of work previously in the National Health Service, creating simple reports on the success of a national public health initiative, which worked well for senior managers (government ministers in that case).

So I come back to the challenge, the age old relationship between lab & fieldwork if you like, what would be the new rule of thumb/thumbs?

I’ve chosen to highlight multiple feedback loops as a useful tool, to help drive top contributors for example (taken from the HP Labs research), but I take your point that for commercial ROI purposes more precision is required. To put it another way in such a dynamic social context how does precision allow you to create heuristics for day to day community management?

Notes on social media feedback loops

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A few slides to layout the principle of different feedback loops between your online community, your site, contributors, readers and other blogs and communities. Any feedback?

Feedback Loops

View more presentations from Stuart Hall.

…And thanks to tweet-feedback from Jenny Ambrozek (@sagenet) for the wider context around the power of feedback loops – see the Fast Company article on how Ning is using this concept (what they term a ‘viral expansion loop’) to great effect. [I'm currently at the British Computer Society at Covent Garden, so looks like I'll be reading the print-out over lunch].

PS: It’s also a key way in which the world’s biggest social network site Facebook, by implementing the ‘status update’ feature, managed to rapidly grow its membership, as I outlined in a recent post. In other words this is a very powerful tool if done well, and with something people want. Anyone want my viral loop consultancy better get in touch quick as I’m off to see a London-based social media agency about this on Thursday!

In the meantime I’ve ordered Adam Penenberg’s book ‘Viral Loop’ (see the Amazon widget on my homepage to order a copy) after a ‘winning streak’ of blog posts on the power of networks & feedback loops led me to his virtual door. If you fancy creating some feedback loops, or plain user flows for that matter, I’ve tracked down what appears to be a useful site: Product Planner. It allows you to create your own viral loops and check out some that have already been created.

And of course I did a very quick search today on Twitter on the key phrase ‘viral loops’ which unearthed this gem of a slideshow, from Josh Jeffreys (Interactive Creative Director at BusyEvent) which provides (in his words) an overview of how to build applications that have built-in mechanisms for driving users to recruit additional users through normal use of the application. Look out for the new acronym ‘UDU’ (users drive users):Viral Loops: Making Self-Marketing Apps

Social networking ability & field sense

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Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable http://shar.es/m3E8W An application to social networking influence is my thought. Cheers!

My tweet today (above) follows my last blog post on the importance of location, rather than the number of connections, in determining an individual’s influence: “we may have got too focused on valuing networks in terms of who is the best connected. In fact the most influential person in the network comes down to location, rather than connections,” according to the research paper ‘Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks’.

In other words if location is important, and if networks are dynamic, then maybe you can get better at being in the right place at the right time to maximise your influence? Perhaps the sports science of ‘field sense’ has something to offer here to online social networking strategy? It’s just a hunch for now.

Talking about complexity

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I was going to write a long piece about the use of complexity science by innovative airline provider DayJet after hearing the inpsiring Brain Storm! podcast, but then realised that despite the Fast Company piece in 2007 saying they were able to predict the future they weren’t able to keep their head above water, and already have gone under.

Oh well, I could have told DayJet president, CEO and founder Ed Iacobuccithem how to apply complexity in the real world without over-reliance on the maths/technology, but looks like I’ll just have to apply it for my own benefit for now:-)