Author: Dale Roberts

Dale is VP of Professional Services for Clarabridge, author, commentator, columnist and speaker. As a professional services leader for Clarabridge in Europe, Roberts is advising some of the world’s largest companies on optimising the customer experience using social and digital insights. Prior to this he was part of the founding circle of Artesian Solutions, an innovator in social CRM and a Director of Services for business intelligence giant Cognos. His first book, Decision Sourcing, is an inspiring commentary on the impact of social on corporate decision making. His latest, World of Workcraft, is a timely piece on engagement, motivation and digital humanism in the workplace. Roberts was identified one of the top thought leaders in big data and analytics by Analytics Week, a contributor to business and technology publications including Wired and ClickZ and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Mediterranean Murder Mystery: Marketing Kills Product on idyllic Spanish Island

In the early 80’s I holidayed in a lovely fishing town on one of the Balearic Islands, an archipelago of Spain. It was bliss. Quiet, peaceful days followed by a relaxed evening stroll around Town hunting for the perfect place to eat.  Choosing the restaurant was as much of the experience as actually dining.  Our rudimentary Spanish and what was, at the time, exotic sounding dishes made the whole thing a voyage of discovery. We would peruse menus, scrutinise the wine list, check out the existing clientele and finally make a selection based on all these things and our mood. After returning, we talked of it often. It was the perfect, as one of my colleagues refers to them, ‘fly and flop’ holiday.

Marketing Begins to Suffocate it’s own Product

We made the mistake of returning some years later. There was little room for building so it hadn’t fallen prey to over development. In fact the beach and the local walks were every bit as relaxing as we remembered. However, the Town had become a battle ground.

It was clear what had happened. One restaurateur, tired of waiting for customers to randomly walk into his establishment erected  a much larger menu board than anyone else. Other’s responded so the Town was awash with ugly over-sized signage. The heat of competition hadn’t stopped there though.  In a level playing field of deals, discounts and enormous menu’s the restaurateurs started sending their staff out each evening to huckster holidaymakers before they walked on elsewhere. As we strolled we were interrupted with information about chef’s specials and one night only deals. Coupons and mini menus were thrust into our hands as we walked. We were even  sometimes accompanied if the desperate seller didn’t feel that we had quite understood the quality of their food or the generosity of their deal. The dining experience had stopped being about the customer and was all about the restaurant. It had stopped being about a relaxing holiday experience (interaction) and was only about filling tables and cash registers (transaction).

In the Absence of Product, Nothing is left But Marketing and Marks

Add a few timeshare touts also in pursuit of their transactions and what was once idyllic was now annoying. What was once a joy of discovery became as irritating as a picnic near a wasps nest. We ended up hiring a car and eating out of Town but the collective opinion was that the quality of the food and service had taken a nose dive too.

A whole Town was behaving like the worst kind of modern marketers. They had forgotten that their value is in meeting the needs of their customers. Their customers, actually holidaymakers, wanted to make their own choice, in their own way largely without interruption. The ‘product’ was a set of interactions, driven by the desire to discover, to explore, to find local dishes. To uncover the best fish in Town or find a rare Rioja whilst promenading and people watching.

Instead a whole Town full of Restaurateurs forgot about good food, great service and reputation. Even in holiday Towns, you get to hear about the good and the bad very quickly. Instead, they fixated on what happened at the end of the meal, their bill, and worked back. We don’t get the transaction unless we remove that random element of discovery and exploration so we will slowly and persistently drive it out. They killed the very thing that their customer came into Town for.

In Memory of the Interaction

I hear that the Town is much quieter now, European holidaymakers favour long haul destinations or stay at home vacations. I am sure though that it is also because they tired of the huckstering. What used to be a warm, and fun experience, a rich set of human interactions became all about the transaction.

Picture: Katherine Le Grice: Mediterranean Village

EA: Why Being Worst Matter More than They Think?

It seems that beating the tobacco companies and those behind environmental negligence to the title of ‘Worst Company in America’ has not been an exercise in humility for Electronic Arts

 

In a statement to Gamer web site Kontaku, EA said “We’re sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren’t nominated this year. We’re going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide.”

 

The statement was described as arrogant and dismissive by Paul Tassi, Forbes contributor. I would add short sighted too.

 

EA are pointing to their worldwide sales achievement to dismiss the vote as inconsequential. However, what they are forgetting in their hubris is that sales is the classic ‘lagging’ indicator. Sales are recorded monthly and publicly announced quarterly and annually in most businesses. Sentiment, on the other hand, is a leading indicator. A dip in employee engagement means that customers are about to become unhappy. A dip in customer sentiment means that your sales are about to be hit. Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced the business world to this cause-and-effect chain decades ago. Customers drive revenues, your business produces value that your customers love or hate, your staff drive the business, your investment in your staff motivates or demotivates them. Simple but a point that the EA spokesman appears to be missing.

 

Now I don’t know the extent to which gamers are about to extract their ire but I do know when a company has spoken too soon. And EA have. EA should reflect on the feedback. Their customers are telling them that they don’t feel respected, that their culture is corporate over creativity, that they are emptying wallets but giving only the bare minimum back.

 

In the light of that sentiment, they should really not be sitting on laurels made of  last quarter’s or last year’s sales. They are gone. Sentiment like this can gather momentum, capture the imagination of a well connected community and have far reaching consequences down the line.  EA should have thought before they spoke. The impact of  the ignominy behind this award is yet to be felt.

Hippo Decision Making

According to Andrew McAfee of the MIT Centre for Digital Business in an article in MIT Sloan Management Review many companies still practice decision making by Hippo. Actually he refers to it as HPPO,  the Highest Paid Persons Opinion. 

This resonated with me having just completed the draft for a chapter on networked decision making in our upcoming book Decision Sourcing, published by Gower. 

McAfee argues that the next wave of enterprise 2.0 will see organisations make decisions in new ways. Decision making by HPPO is in sharp decline.

 

The book argues that the current default mechanic for organisational decision making , the hierarchy, has literally run out of steam. It’s origins are rooted in a time where capital was scarce and labour was abundant. The top of the hierarchy was probably occupied by the owner of the capital. They also had the most business experience, the most knowledge and enough life experience to co-ordinate the work of everyone else. In a knowledge based economy, these things just don’t align any more.  One of the hottest jobs at the moment, that of ‘community manager’ didn’t exist five years ago. If you are managing a community manager today, you have most likely never been a community manager yourself.  As a manager of a community manager you better be good at co-ordinating the work of others, the primary purpose of management because you are not adding too much in the way of domain experience.

 

Social Decision Making, those decisions made by Socially aligned organisations will take many more inputs, many more perspectives all helped by the automation afforded by enterprise social platforms. There will be no decision made simply because of the HiPPO. They will undoubtedly be better for it.

Enterprise Social Circles

Paul Adams,  Facebook Product Manager and former Social researcher at Google led the charge into Social Circles.  Quite frankly, according to Adams, ‘Friends’ really didn’t cover it. We have family relationships, relationships with our colleagues and closer ‘besty’ friends. We also have relationships that are built during life stages (university) or around hobbies (football teams, diving) and those that are built because of locality (neighbours)

 

These are all social circles appropriate to (what I call) lifestyle social circles. But what about our professional social circles? Professional social circles, professional communities are built in Social platforms like LinkedIn or inside our own organisation. These circles, or communities, also include life (or career) stage communities such as inductees and locality (same office) But what other types of professional social circles are there? Some might be functional, customer specific, product or service specific?

 

I would welcome your suggestions and comments here:

Decision Making problems are not new, in fact they are centuries old

Not Frank BuytendijkFrank Buytendijk delivered a great keynote at 8am in Las Vegas at the TDWI conference in February 2012. He avoided the technicalities of data architectures, the rigours of  data modelling and the disciplines of agile methods.

 

Instead, over breakfast, he dipped into the world of philosophy and asked us to consider the centuries old problems of what is true? what is real? and what is good?

 

Referring to Plato, Thales and Machiavelli Buytendijk lead us through some fundamentals about decision making.

What is True?

Firstly decisions are not just about the data. Do we decide to pay for parking because we calculate the cost of a ticket against the cost of a fine but factored by the risk of getting a fine? Or do we do it because we think it is the ‘right’ thing to do, the ‘civic’ thing to do?

 

What is Real?

So often, even with all the dashboards, scorecards, reports and charts, senior executives don’t seem to know what’s going on. Like in Plato’s Cave, the shadows on the wall are not reality, they are representations of reality. How much could really be told by listening to our customers directly rather than waiting for analysis much later?

 

What is Good?

Predictive analytics can provide great information that allow micro-segmentation. For example it could help an insurance company to identify those most likely to claim on their insurance policy for back and neck strain based on their on-line behaviours. Increasing their premiums might protect the business from additional costs but  the insurance business model is about distributing the risk not identifying it perfectly. Taken to it’s conclusion then there is no need for insurance, we all pay for the cost of our health care as and when it happens. However, if the insurance company used this information to promote lifestyle changes for this group then ethics and business models are aligned.

 

What’s it all about?

Buytendijk’s quirky, thought provoking start to the TDWI conference tells us that in IT, we  are wrestling with problems that preoccupied philosophers centuries ago. It also tells us though that in IT we can think too much and reflect too little.

A Short Post on Air Quote Reduction from WFH Cynics

As working practices change, many decision makers are ‘telepresent’. I have at least two customers that operate a two desk for three policy so are clearly assuming a third of their workforce are simply not in the office on any one given day.

The decision makers cubicle is empty or more likely gone along with many others. The whole office may well have been emptied and now home to a new Starbucks.

Decision Makers spend are spending more time working from home or working from hubs. Ironically, they might even be in the Starbucks where all the cubicles used to be.

Which brings me to the reduction of air quotes.  if I have seen one set of air quotes to accompany the phrase ‘working from home’ I have seen a thousand. Stop it. Your inference offends me and the overwhelming majority of workers use home working as an opportunity to get stuff done, often late into the night.

 

Some also use it to take the opportunity to drop off/collect children or carry out some other family commitment that would otherwise be a pain in the proverbial, require time out of the office or both. It’s a gift from their enlightened employer that they return two or threefold at the beginning or end of the day. What I hear most often from home workers is that their overall output improves once they have worked out a sensible work pattern. They get into the ‘flow’ of increased productivity which would otherwise be interrupted by, amongst other things, the chattering water cooler crowd overusing air quotes.

Collaborative Decision Making and the Big Salad

Tom’s Diner

DSC01291Some good friends of mine have asked me to take part in what seems like an amazing concept later this year. Rooven Pakkiri and Stuart Mcintyre of Collaboration Matters are eschewing the usual cubicle stylee stand at their next show at UC Expo on the 6th and 7th March. Instead, they intend to build an all-American Diner complete with actors rather than the usual ‘stand’ sales folk.  This really caught my imagination not least because I had paid a recent (last year) pilgrimage to possibly the most famous diner in the world, Tom’s Diner, in New York, the setting for a Suzanne Vega song and Monk’s Diner from Seinfeld.

 

Nighthawks

The idea is to contrast Edward Hopper’s famous painting ‘Nighthawks’ a study in loneliness and alienation in a big city with Josh Ellingson’s modern take of a Diner, Wifi Diner. Ellingson’s work, commissioned for Wired Magazine, shows what is possible when we are all connected. For me, this sounds like it may take a little explaining to a crowd that are used to something very different but it will be a welcome relief and a great introduction Social Business for many. Businesses, in my view, should do more of this. It demonstrates leading rather than following.

 

Watch and Listen

The stand will feature a live debate between thought leaders in the Social space and I will be representing my own company, Artesian Solutions, innovators in Social Listening and will be sharing my thoughts on Social and Social Analytics.  See you there.

Social Media Listening, Lets Call the Whole Thing Off?

The couple in Ira Gershwin’s song Lets call the whole thing off  lamented the way they pronounced the same words differently because it exposed class differences which might eventually be their undoing. Human communication is a funny thing. If Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had met on Facebook then regardless of how they pronounced neither, either and tomato, they would have assumed that they, like the spelling, were a perfect match.

Understanding nuance in human communication is a preoccupation for those of us building social media analytic applications and specifically as it applies to the Social Listening process. Social listening is the data collection process in a social media analytics application, the point at which the vast sea of blog, editorial and social media content is collected and converted into usable analysis. The purpose of Social Listening is to collect and filter ‘mentions’, instances of the company, brand, product or marketing campaign being referenced in an item of online content. Most platforms are good at collecting mentions but many fail in their level of accuracy, not because of scale and volume but because they don’t understand the human capacity for saying the same thing in so many different ways.

Fred and Ginger were both speaking (American) English and yet still had problems because language is only one of the many considerations when we try to understand the written word. Slang, regional idioms and differences in style relating to social groupings, profession, generation and gender are just a few others.

Anyone with teenage children can tell you about generational language differences. At one time my Son and his friends frequently used the expression ‘you just got pwned’ or ‘he pwned me’ usually but not exclusively when gaming. It describes the process of being decisively and unambiguously beaten by a competitor. ‘Pwned’ is a corruption of ‘owned’ attributed to a mis-spelling by a world of warcraft map designer and for some reason it fell into common usage. Unlike much of what we deal with in information systems, there is no rule, no derivation, it is simply something which is known. Without this knowledge what would a social media monitoring platform make of the tweet ‘coke pwns pepsi’ (or the other way around, of course)?

Other differences are equally obtuse. Take emoticons. Baby boomers rarely use them, gen-X ers commonly use them and gen Y-ers use them but differently. A gen-X er is more likely to use 🙂 and a gen -Y er 🙂 Very little difference to the human eye but in traditional text filters they simply don’t match.

Many are a little surprised when I point out that the author’s gender makes a difference to the language used. Of course, women might be more likely to discuss hormone replacement therapies and men more likely to discuss male pattern baldness if they are blogging about their mid-life crisis but given a gender-neutral topic, men and women still use different language. One website, gender genie, can identify the gender of the author of a piece of text with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy.

What does all of this mean? It means that Social Media Analytics platforms have to understand the rich, inconsistent and unfathomable ways in which we all converse. To get more specific and technical, social listening must employ linguistic variant sets to accurately disambiguate language variations. Simply put, they must be able to handle a set of alternative way of saying the same thing. Social listening must be inclusive of all diversity regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, social status, profession and yes, sexuality before they can capture data suitable for the purpose of analytics. Otherwise, you might as well just call the whole thing off.

 

Also reproduced for IBM Vision for the IT expert community.

The Social Triangle: Business, Brand and Analytics

Social TriangleMention social and we immediately think about the dizzying number of people using Facebook and, as businesses, how we reach them as customers or prospective customers.

 

This is only part of the story though.  Today, my own business, a provider of information software and services, will not find it’s customers on Facebook however hard we look.  However, this doesn’t mean that social isn’t relevant to us. That would be a limiting and ‘traditional’ view of Social as a Brand only which is a single point on the Social Triangle.

 

Michael Brito, SVP of Edelman Digital, commented in a recent article on Brainyard distinguished between the Social Business and the Social Brand.  The Social Brand, he argues, is a company, product, or individual that uses social technologies to communicate with social customers, their partners and constituencies, or the public. The Social Business, on the other hand, is one that has integrated and operationalized social media within job functions internally. The third point on the triangle is Analytics, the practical use of information to make decisions.

 

The aspiration is that both Brand and Business are for engagement not just broadcasting and that Analytics is used as actionable information. Let me offer an example.

 

I recently tried to book a London hotel room for my Son because he had a very early train journey on the Eurostar. I wanted to pay so that it was one less thing for him to be concerned about at 4am. I made an advanced reservation and several days, calls, emails and faxes (yes faxes) later and the hotel chain could still not confirm this part of the arrangement. Whilst I don’t do this often, I resorted to tweeting a #fail.

 

What happened next was pure Social Brand. A number of other hotel chains messaged me to offer me deals in London Hotels. Indeed, they still do. It left an overriding impression that everyone listened but no one heard.

 

A Social Business with a Social Brand using Social Analytics would have behaved completely differently. The tweet would have appeared in a dashboard and tagged as negative sentiment and that this related to dissatisfaction with the booking process.  Social Analytics would have been able to identify that I was a frequent traveller with children in university and that I was highly likely to use UK hotels over the coming 12 months. Social analytics would also have been able to identify the level of influence I have with others in this socio and demographic group (not as high as I think)

 

The information would have been shared around the organisation not just Marketing and it would have been shared efficiently using social tools not email.   A customer services representative may have tried to resolve the specific for me but the general issue would have found it’s way to a manager responsible for the booking process after which a decision will be made to  either fix this in their booking systems to attract other ‘surrogate bookers’ or to continue to deal with it as exception or even to do nothing. Next time a frustrated parent booking arrived everyone would know how to handle it or what the policy was because the whole dialogue would have been captured and tagged in a searchable activity stream. The marketing team might even build a new campaign that focused on how they understand their customers better and the ease of parental bookings.

 

A Social Brand engages in meaningful dialogue with it’s customers, a Social Business engages a motivated workforce to fix problems or to exploit new opportunities. Finally Social Analytics keep the whole process informed with timely and relevant information so that the focus is on the right customers and products and that effective, insightful and informed decisions are made.

Social Analytics … At a Glance

First off, let me stipulate that I absolutely support the notion that technologists of a certain age (let’s go with over 40) should regularly evaluate what they need to ‘unlearn’ in order to make way for new thinking.

However, some older techniques really do stand the test of time when attempting to understand new concepts. Take Social Analytics. It’s a hot topic and information specialists are trying to get their heads around what it it and what the business benefits are.

To help me understand, I started researching in the usual way. Books, white papers, articles and opinion. But as I did so, I drew up a ‘Dimension Map’ and a list of questions. Two simple devices that are as useful today in clarifying information requirements and their usefulness as they were err, a few years ago.

The first, a dimension map, has as it’s columns, the dimensions of measurement. So a revenue dimension map would typically have columns for product, customer etc. The rows are hierarchical levels so time (and most things are measured over time) might be years, months and days. The final column is a list of metrics. These are the measurements that can be analysed by the dimensions so a revenue dimension map would include sales value, sales qty. Easy, right. The social media dimension map below is very much a work in progress but I trust you find it useful as a ‘Social Analytics at a Glance’ diagram from which you can expand your thinking in the way that I intend to.

The question list is self explanatory but is a really simple and illustrative way to remind us that the purpose of information is to make decisions by answering business questions.

Social Analytics Dimension Map

Questions;

  1. Who does or does not like me|my product|my campaign|my brand?
  2. Who influences my customers?
  3. Do influencers like me|my product|my campaign|my brand?
  4. Are my customers talking more about me|my product|my campaign|my brand? than my competitors? i.e what is my share of voice?
  5. What are my customers saying about my competitor? i.e. what are the competitive opportunities or threats?