Bruce MacVarish Notes

Conversation Analytics : Patterns, Sentiment & Intent

Here is another proof point supporting my vision for the emergence of conversation analytics. 

Autonomy announces Autonomy Explore:

"Autonomy Explore connects to all customer touchpoints including web, contact center, social media and email to deliver a complete understanding of each customer and customer segment, as well as the overall customer-base. Powered by Autonomy's unique meaning-based technology platform, Autonomy Explore enables businesses to automatically understand, act on, and optimize customer patterns, sentiment and intent."

I have spent the last few years defining, designing and prototyping integrated multimedia communication analytics solutions for users, enterprises and contact centers.  The key elements of aggregating conversations across multiple user touchpoints and analyzing conversation patterns, sentiment and intent are all coming together.   

Get Ready.  We are on the cusp of a breakthrough in conversation analytics for enterprises, contact centers and individual users.

Trust Extends From Our Social Core

Who do you trust online?  

Mathew Ingram from GigaOm summarizes a conversation with Craig Newmark and what he thinks is the next big problem the web has to solve.

"And what is that? The question of who to trust online, according to Newmark. To solve it, he believes that what the web needs is a “distributed trust network” that allows us to manage our online relationships and reputations.   I just happened to have a Flip video camera with me, so I convinced him to let me capture a few minutes of him discussing this concept; I’ve embedded the clip below. 

Newmark called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps” for the web over the next decade (he said he wasn’t sure that was the best way to describe it, but was trying out to see how it sounded). He talked about “reputation and trust ruling the web, just the way it does in real life,” and how he was looking to big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon as the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation management network. And he said that despite some occasional missteps by both Google and Facebook when it came to privacy (Google Buzz and Facebook Beacon, respectively), he believed that both were acting in good faith and had a policy of “not being evil.”

For me, I found the following quote from Mark helpful: "“reputation and trust ruling the web, just the way it does in real life".   

Getting Google, Facebook and Amazon to cooperate on a standard that is consistent and distributed will be necessary, but not sufficient.   Having the big boys align represents a top-down agreement on a common approach, protocols and tools that will help us manage trust across our social networks.   Mark is describing the process to manage trust, but not necessarily the source of trust.  I think, to get started, the source of trust will extend from the core of our social network.

The people we trust online will start and extend from the people we trust in real life.   The people we consider to be the most important and valuable group of family, friends and/or colleagues in our life have earned our trust.   They are the trusted core of our real-life social network.

I believe that in the rush to enable users to build extended social networks with 1,000's of "friends" and "followers", we have overshot the need of users to truly leverage and unleash the power of the conversations, relationships and trust found in the core of our social network.

Those at the core of our lives - our most important family, friends and colleagues - represent the core of our trusted social network in real-life.  Solving social trust online should extend from our real-life social core.

UPDATE:  I came across a post from Daniel Tunkelang related to the same interview of Craig Newmark.  I trust Daniel's opinion on this topic and value his perspective.  Daniel asks "Can We Build a Distributed Trust Network?"

The Future of Advantage is Allocative and Creative

I really like Umair Haque's HBR post on The New Paradigm of Advantage because it provides a framework for thinking about the new sources of strategic advantage for a product, a business unit or a company.    From his post:

"Over the last few months, I've discussed in depth the tectonic shifts rocking the macro and micro economy. Let's put it all together. Here's what the 21st century demands from firms of all stripes: a paradigm shift in the nature of advantage.

The past of advantage was extractive and protective. The future of advantage, on the other hand, is allocative and creative. I made a little Prezi to illustrate it, below. Let's go through each category in turn.

The future of advantage:

Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. Match.com is building an allocative advantage in, well, matching people with partners. Allocative advantage asks: are we able to match people with what makes them durably, tangibly better off — and can we do it 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Creative.

Apple's advantage is, of course, radically creative: built on creating insanely great stuff that turns entire industries upside down. Next month, the iPad promises to do what the iPhone and iPod did before it. The power's in the creativity, not just the technology: Apple's thinking different yet again. Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals?

And the past:

Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft's just a flea on Wall St's elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Protective.

Think Microsoft's the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto's Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?

These dimensions are mutually exclusive. When a company pursues an extractive or protective advantage, it cannot hone an allocative or creative advantage. The opportunity cost of protecting yesterday is creating tomorrow. The opportunity cost of extracting resources is allocating them in better ways.To extract or protect is to forgo finding better ways of allocating or creating.

and his presentation on Prezi:

The New Paradigm of Advantage on Prezi

Persuasive Games

As a follow-up to Jesse Schell's presentation at DICE 2010 where he outlines the potential of persuasive games to alter our behaviors because we know we're being measured (and want the points to level up),  Mathias Crawford offers a different benefit of persuasive games:

"...reliance on External Rewards obviates the true potential of persuasive games: namely, that they can be used to help people think about themselves, the world, and life in new and empowering ways. Rather than relying on persuasive games to provoke or impede certain behaviors, what if they were used to open up a world of previously inaccessible experiences? What if games were used to get people thinking about why they acted in particular ways? If they helped them identify if these behaviors were in line with who they believe they are and how they ought to be? If they helped people think through the steps they needed to take to improve themselves from within, rather than from without? "

"Ends vs. Means and Persuasion", Mathias Crawford, Institute for the Future

Whether focused on changing our behaviors from within or without, I believe we'll see an increase in game mechanics being embedded in enterprise communication and collaboration solutions. 

Recorded Future looks Promising

I continue to believe that the future state of enterprise apps is:

1. Delivered by Hybrid Cloud models integrating private + public virtualized resources

2. User data driven with a focus on user experience 

3. Social enabling of user transactions, conversations and relationships

4. Device agnostic applications running across devices, web and premise platforms

5. Real-time aggregation, filtering and visualization of user information and activity

6. Sensing-based by acting on user's ambient and declarative data

With these guiding principles as context, you can see why I think early stage, semi-stealth Recorded Future is an interesting start-up with great promise.   

The ability to aggregate, index, filter and visualize trends and patterns resulting from a number of conversation, transaction and social media sources to predict future events is a powerful value proposition for individual users and enterprises.

Check out this video to get a better understanding of how Recorded Future can map and visualize changes in a social graph over time by collecting and analyzing relevant events, media and conversations.