Justin Hayward`s SI Project

Business to business...

There's an interesting discussion here on social influence in the business-to-business space when it comes to influencing decision-making.  Joseph Mann speculates that the decision-making process in the B2B space is far more complex (an average of 3.5 decision-makers per purchase is cited, as is the significant cost of the deal) but then the comment following is useful to note; the experience of the commentator is one of emotional-rational-emotional - and that means that social influence can guide the initial shortlisting of the supplier quite dramatically before the decision is made.  Secondly, even the rational element of checking that the product or service will do what it says it will on the tin can also be researched online, meaning that endorsement of a more technical bent in attesting that it works can also influence.  The final element is of course about relationships and is the true measure when it comes to face-to-face word of mouth.  It is in the last - often extremely short - decision based on emotion, that the deal is done.

It's just semantics...

An interesting mashup* event last night at BT Centre aiming to talk about the development and delivery of the semantic web.  Many comments about it being the most interesting mashup* to date, this one organised by the chaps behind Vecosys, Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher.  the main thrust of the event was around RDF and microformats - two ways of sucking data into meaningful and personalised structures onto the desktop - for more detail, see here.

What's worrying is how Western-world all of this development is.  The discussion was centred around the ability for information to come to the desk/laptop and be seen in wonderful widgets, when in fact the growth market at the moment is in mobile handset technology in India and Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) at present.  The web just isn't being experienced by a growing number of people in PC/Mac format and the danger is that the Western world will be left behind, spending time 'pimping' the way in which information is presented, chroming and polishing what is in effect information without meaning, rather than moving to something that is both machine readible and machine understandible.

For all the talk about standards last night, I can't help feeling that when it gets implemented in the real world, as much as it will please developers who will push it forward and enable the next level of meaningful transfer of data to people's desktops, when it comes to regulation - at a national level - of all of this stuff ratified by W3C, countries like China, India and many others will baulk at allowing this kind of functionality to pervade. 

As I mentioned last night to the organiser, when arguments don't get resolved and the two parties walk away none the better, the phrase 'It's just semantics' is heard echoing through the halls as to the reasons why people disagree.

However, all that said, RDF and microformats are a very interesting way of being able to mash up information together to gain a deeper, richer understanding of who, what and where people are doing things online, and what they think of what they're reading/participating in.  At the same time, as these things rip information and whole sites down to the desktop, it becomes harder to track what people are up to on the web, and thus, how they are being influenced.  It may prove increasingly challenging for companies like BuzzMetrics and Hitwise to understand how people are behaving online - although I may be wrong here.

Banging the echo chamber...

Great post from Bryan Solis here about the confusion and fight over what social media is and isn't.  Roll on socialised media networks!

Traffic and flow...

Interesting post from Stowe Boyd on traffic and flow, mooting about some new tools he is developing.  Looking forward to hearing about them.  There is definitely a recognition here that content is becoming less static, and therefore less 'peaky' and becoming more flowing and thus more 'streamlike' - and in a sense becoming underground rivers rather than mountains, where tracking the conversation and its flow needs deeper interaction of monitoring technologies...

Mapping the Blogosphere...

Twingly looks like an amazing view of the world of real-time blogging and seems to be wasted as a screensaver.  Whilst I haven't downloaded it you can see the video of what it does here (work machine security protocols prevent me from downloading the relevant .NET extensions for it to run).  I'd love to see whether this records memes travelling historically over time and whether hotspots of sites of social influence can be seen in different colours (or indeed individuals of influence and the resulting links).  Find out more here.  It kind of reminds me of my tectonic plate theory (see here, here and here) visually if we can track meme's, individuals of influence and the emergence of new territories of significance.

On authority and influence...

There have been a couple of posts that have interested me recently regarding how to search for and understand the authority and influence of both sites and the commentary that is conducted 'between' or 'through' the network that is developed around sites - the flow of information and traffic which allows information to pass 'across' the internet in a physical, offline world sense, moving from one region to another.

The first is here and it deals with resources for searching authoritative sources.  I was especially interested to read the below in comments from Nathan Gilliatt:

"That’s the problem of popularity versus influence, and it points out a problem with Technorati for identifying influential bloggers. Measuring influence in the context of a specific topic gets into the proprietary tools (which I’m researching for my current project)."

I totally agree with the comment about popularity versus influence, especially when it comes to the way in which Technorati measures.  It brings me to believe that trusting one source alone for a measure of anything is not robust enough to stand up to industry scrutiny.  Further, as many commenters highlighted, it is possible to blend, mix and filter sources these days (think Yahoo Pipes, although in its infancy) in order to validate information through other sources. 

However, Mitch Ratcliffe's comments are highly telling:

"The idea of authority is unrelated to the word as we use it in normal conversation. If you look for all the postings on the particular topic you want to find “authoritative” bloggers for, you would need to parse the results into several dimensions of data, including the actual number and frequency of postings on the topic, the number links to those postings (as compared to all the postings on the blog), and the way those postings shaped other sites’ discussion of the subject in order to approach “authority,” which is defined by the OED as: “the confidence resulting from personal expertise.” "

It turns out at BuzzLogic, that's exactly what they do and add it to a number of other ingredients as well.  But they don't term it 'authority', rather they use the term 'influence', neither of which is 'popularity'.  And none of it do they define, leaving the rest of the industry in the dark as to the way in which they come up with any answers.

I will leave this floating and only say, can something without any authority have any influence? I believe it can.  Can something without any popularity have any influence?  I'm not sure.  Can something without any popularity be authoritative?  Yes, absolutely.  Are there any clear conclusions we can take away from this though?  I think not.  What we need to understand again is the clear view of what we are trying to measure and then define it.

 

 

Burning issues...

This is a site for discussing the development of something that will probably be shot down in flames by a number of professionals and bloggers, but it's something I feel is a burning issue within the public relations and marketing world.  As my progress in working towards the development of a solution to this question becomes more solid, I'll be posting stuff to this site in order to validate the progress where possible.

I say where possible as I'm working with some partners on this particular exploit.  I believe it's important to do this kind of thing with checks and balances.  It can't be done in a vacuum.  At the same time, I recognise that I don't have the intellectual rigour to come up with a Eureka-like essence at the heart of this, nor the scientific capability to make it work.  What I can do is come up with the idea, mould it and make sure it works for me and our clients in order to help them understand complexity a little bit.  So, I will post when my partners are happy with what we're up to and where we're at and only then.

What I can do is reveal earlier what we're up to and who I am working with to make this a reality.  I can also put my expectations and hopes down as to what I'm hoping to achieve with this exercise and how it might be rolled out and utilised in future.

I really hope this works.  It's about time we as a profession utilise the skills and talents of other industries and specialities appropriately to inform and make robust the recommendations which we know are to be right but yet are difficult to prove.

Thanks for reading.