Awaiting Igon Valuation

In Steven Pinker’s eloquent review of Gladwell’s new collection of essays, he coins a new calamity - “the Igon Value Problem,” mocking Gladwell for his misunderstanding/ misspelling of the term “eigenvalue” as igon value. The Problem, as defined by Pinker is,

when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Now, I’m laughing all the way home, believe me, but I’m concerned that our industry is one that is fueled by Igon Valuation. Is it not true that there’s a deep hunger for sweeping generalizations in lay speak? A thirst for buzzy buzz words to capture compelling psychological constructs? Isn’t that essentially what industry analysts are lionized for?

Three masquerades of metrics

Below is an excerpt of a post I wrote for our Collaboratory today. Curious to hear readers' thoughts on measurement flaws and opportunities in the social space. Please find the full post here. 

Reflections on Reflections on Working in Public

When we launched our Collaboratory, I mentioned that it's part web presence, part social business experiment. For now, the most experimental part is the window on our work-- a live stream of communication acts our team engages in, offering up varying degrees of information from having shared an unnamed file on a particular platform to emailing someone at a certain domain to tweeting specific, visible content. 

Dachis Group Social Business Technology Alliances

Another week, another announcement: today, about our Social Business Technology Alliance program. 

Social should imply specificity

There’s an inherent problem with the word social. Not “social media” or “social business.” Just social. The problem is, it doesn’t incorporate any sense of specificity to it. People are left to think that all things social are massive connectivity festivals. Really, being social is about connecting with sensible, specific others, typically, for specific reasons.

It’s great to open things up and give people freedom, but specificity-- that is, some focus or structure- is what really unleashes talent. Specificity comes in many forms of social systems. As Tom Malone et al. point out, the “genome” of collective intelligence can be broken down into Who (staffing), What (goal), Why (incentives), and How (process). Each of these "genes" demand specificity.

Take the Netflix Challenge, for one: its success as a crowdsourced effort was attributed to connecting the right people only after some jockeying happened. It was not a result of all participants being connected, helter-skelter. Often throwing too many people into the mix leads to hasty and irrational outcomes due to groupthink or lazy free-loading, as a result of social loafing -- not to mention pluralistic ignorance where we incorrectly assume acceptance of a given norm.

A less oft-cited method of making a social system work has less to do with who is connected and more to do with what you ask of those connections. This is a critical focus as researchers migrate from surveys as our mainstay methodology. Good questions are the currency of social systems that flow between the focused connections discussed above.

The other day I noticed Rypple made an important change in this direction with its “Power of One” initiative. Rypple, as you might know, lets you give and receive feedback online (anonymously), to and from select others. All humans lack an inherent sense of psychometrics, so it’s hard to know precisely what to ask, especially when the stakes are high. That is, you’re asking *specific* trusted others for self-related feedback. The inclination is to ask open-ended questions. Logic being similar to the above: connect everyone // ask people to tell you anything and any number of things. Turns out, lack of specificity leads to confusion, and in most cases non-response. Rypple is alleviating this problem by encouraging users to ask “what’s *one thing* I can do to improve.”

It’s usually one question that makes or breaks a given finding. Gallup’s one question, “Do you have a best friend at work” is the biggest predictor of workplace engagement. Other research shows that one question self-assessments of health are better predictors of mortality than an extensive battery of objective health data. Reicheld told us six years ago that your Net Promoter score is “The One Number you Need to Grow.”

My point is not about measurement error and response bias, it’s about specificity. Being direct in order to make social systems effective. Finding the signal amidst the noise.

We can't go on idly talking about "social" initiatives. We must be focused in order to make social systems effective. This pertains to who is in your ecosystem, how they are connected, why they are connected, and how you measure those connections.

Being social is not necessarily complex. If you apply a lens of specificity, you can systematically simplify the situation.

Lab, Sweet Home(page)

Today we launch our laboratory on social business design: The Collaboratory.

It’s a work in progress, and today is the first step. When you arrive, you’ll notice a window on our world of work: a live stream of our communication-- sharing files, yamming, tweeting, and yes, emailing, since no one is perfect yet.

The Collaboratory moonlights as our web presence, offering more information about our company, curating readings about social business design, and eventually inviting clients to engage with us in social business. Rather than making it a static repository of knowledge, we’re testing out new ways to make it more dynamic and blur the lines of transparency and other notions, previously standards of how business has been done.

My favorite aspect of it is its experimental nature, so please participate and help us turn it into something really interesting. We've also posted our first piece of thought leadership, available for download. I hope this stimulates millions of questions from you, particularly about the interface of social science and business; I encourage you to engage, question, critique, comment. We've been thinking about these concepts for just over a year now and are excited to open our doors and engage with our ecosystem.

Think culture change, not brainwashing...

You might laugh, but as I’ve been thinking about the culture change associated with social business design, I’m reminded of the literature on coercive persuasion, aka brainwashing, in its ugliest form.

Only brainwashing has such negative connotations. Abandon those. The part I’m thinking about, the systematic methodology to get people to change their attitudes to drastically different ones, is not necessarily evil. 

I know it seems strong - or wrong - to compare culture change to brainwashing, but building the new collaborative culture we’re talking about takes a lot of work. Unless, of course you’re just asking people to use social technologies and not genuinely change their ways, their attitudes, their business processes. 

Most people aren’t-- they’re asking how we get hierarchical, silo-d, and competitive cultures to change to more democratic, participative, or hiveminded ones.

Enter “thought reform” methodology from reputable psychologists like Edgar Schein or Robert Jay Lifton, as deduced from extreme situations like American POWs in the Korean war. Of course, it requires slight adaptation to be more relevant to an organizational setting. 

The POW brainwashing tactics were complex, but there are three major phases that are typically identified. Keep in mind, in the case of the POWs, which I don’t for a second endorse a direct analog to employees of corporate life, it was all about breaking down identity through abuse, starvation, isolation, sleep deprivation, etc.. Rather than breaking down who you are, I’ve adapted the process to be about how you work. I’ve also removed the need for undue conditions (managers take note). 

A loose adaptation: simplified steps to "induce" culture change:

Dachis Group Ecosystem Expansion



As my readers will agree, when you hear someone talking about successful strategies to share hidden data and drive collective intelligence, you can’t help but be endeared. Throw a picture of Madonna into the same presentation (re: adoption challenges) and your interest skyrockets, no? Such was the case when I first heard Lee Bryant eloquently present on transition strategies for E2.0 adoption. 

Lee is the co-founder and director of Headshift, a company that we, the Dachis Group, excitedly announce today we have acquired. Headshift is a leader in the space who understands that social business is a new way of working, not just the use of new technology. Headshift, like us, realizes that organizations today need socially calibrated ideas and tools, and most importantly, strong strategy to implement them.

We believe global organizations will evolve their participation in social media into social business. When this happens, integration, scale, and adoption will become complex issues that can only be solved with a solid strategic foundation: social business design. Social business design is a systematic, comprehensive approach that spans three core areas: optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation. 

These three areas of business present ripe opportunities for improved outcomes such as cost savings, new product/service innovations, and increased revenue streams. These outcomes occur when organizations connect and expand their ecosystems, evolve toward a more open culture, and empower employees, business partners and customers to actively participate in their business.

Our acquisition of Headshift will allow us to service the increasing demand for global organizations to become social businesses. It will also allow us to attract the best talent internationally, create our own global, collaborative culture and do the absolute best work in this space. Headshift has done extensive work in Professional and Legal Services, Consumer Products, Media and Publishing, Health Care, and Government; and, worked with global companies including AXA, British Petroleum, and the BBC. 

I’m excited to expand our ecosystem to include Headshift as collaborators to help global organizations (and organisations) become social businesses. I’m also particularly eager to drink virtual tea with my new colleagues overseas. Welcome, Headshift!

For more information: 

• The official press release for this news can be found here.
  
• For more on the Dachis Group and our services, visit our company site and follow us on Twitter.

My colleagues' perspectives on our expansion can be found on their blogs:

marking your social media territory

SXSWi: voting is live

My hockey coach once told me you should always vote for yourself. If you have any hesitation, you shouldn't play, run for leadership positions, or in this case, submit ideas. 

Social Business By Design (David Armano)

• Description: The hype around social media has become deafening. Organizations are feeling pressured to "join the conversation” or risk being irrelevant. However, a “social business” has to be designed from the ground up and the top down in order to achieve transformation which scales. Are we ready to move beyond lip service?
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• Will address: What is "social business design"? Why is this important to me? What implications does social business design have for my organization? Why do I need a "social business strategy"? What technologies are relevant? How will this help me with my current social business initiatives? What should I be measuring? Why is this different from what I'm doing now? How will advancements in cloud computing, open source, and mobile factor? Where do I start?

Sponsored Conversations: Good Strategy or Spam? (Peter Kim)

• Description: Does sponsored social media content work? When it comes to pay-for-play, many bloggers see no issue with “sponsored conversations” and point out that it’s happened for years. Others decry this practice as payola and challenge the credibility of those who accept payments. Who’s right?
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• Will address: Should marketers support sponsored conversations? Do bloggers undermine their credibility by accepting payments? Will the FTC ruling have a material impact on this practice? How are large consultancies advising their blue chip clients on this issue? How do well-known bloggers see an impact on their approach? What standards should bloggers adhere to, especially vis-a-vis journalists? Can paying for conversation deliver unbiased content? Does this work as a form of advertising? From those who have participated, what's the ROI of sponsored conversations? Is this an inevitable trend, as Forrester claims? If so, how big will it get?

Stop the Insanity: Making Sense of the Social Web (me)

• Description: As social technologies become woven into our lives, our breadcrumbs become more varied and dimensional. Making sense of this information is challenging- for users and marketers. Methods from social and personality psychology are potential antidotes. Enough with pages views to demonstrate value. How can analysis account for the rich depth of data?
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• Will address: How, besides traditional web analytics, can you demonstrate the value of social technology? Why is everyone obsessed with Influence and Engagement-- does either construct have any merit? What is a good framework to use when thinking about data available through social technology? Which constructs matter when you're "listening" online? As users, how can we make sense of the information we give and receive about ourselves everyday? Are there better ways to present myself online? Quicker ways to perceive others? What can you really know about someone based on their profile, blog, or tweets? What do marketers currently know about us, based on our online communication? What can social scientists tell us about social media? Are there any ways for marketers to go beyond buzz levels and sentiment?
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• Potential panelists: Jonathan Carson - co-founder, BuzzMetrics; President International, Nielsen Online; Daniel Debow - co-founder, co-CEO Rypple; Sam Gosling - University of Teaxas at Austin Personality psychologist and author of Snoop: What your stuff says about you

Hopefully see you in Austin soon. And if we do get in, be sure to Tweet precisely!