The Context of “Intent”

July 31, 2009 at 4:25 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Innovation, Intent, Interaction, Social Media, Web 2.0

Two differentiating attributes of 2.0 are adaptation and emergence. Adaptive systems rely on feedback loops for continuous assessment. Emergence is the result of self-organizing adaptation. The more fluid a solution architecture, the more readily it can adapt. But fluid architectures are not yet the norm and there will always be situations where more structure is needed. In both cases, we will still rely on individuals to call out a need for adaptation, effectively — change.

Collaborative Web 2.0 environments like getsatisfaction.com, while self-organizing — allowing people to solve problems among themselves — do not adapt. There is no real problem solving going on. People are either sharing information for things that aren’t really problems (lack of knowledge) or they’re devising workarounds. Until the workarounds are acknowledged, there will be no changes to really ‘fix’ the problem.

Consider the volume of money spent on marketing, sales and even customer service — all focused on gaining customers and business transactions. What ratio is that compared to money spent to ‘allow’ individuals to interact with a business, clearing the rubbish that gets in the way of people who ’show up’ to do business? I’d like to call this the intent ratio: how intent businesses are at addressing the intent of their consumers.  Companies might focus on measuring ‘retention’, but are inattentive to the business ‘machine’ and its health, starting with the points of interaction — the touchpoints — assessing them from the perspective of the individuals.

In Web1.0, one prevalent means of assessing interactions is via Web Analytics and Web Metrics. I hold the highest respect for two leaders in this space, namely Eric T. Peterson and Avinash Kaushik.

This work, however, is only part of a larger domain of interaction assessment: Design Research. This generic term applies equally to all interactions and related design (online and offline). For some audiences, I also use the label “Consumer Insight” (in E2.0, the predominant ‘consumer’ is the employee).

This model was devised to differentiate key research sources and related activities:

• Transactional Analytics
  For online interactions, this typically = clickstream. The clickstream captures the interaction or transaction. While relevant, this data is nearly useless in isolation. It lacks the necessary context to draw meaningful conclusions. Knowing how many people visited a site is not nearly as relevant as why they visited (intent) and how successful they felt they were. Having a heartbeat tells you little about your health.
• Behavioral Analytics
  This is the marriage of action and intent. If you don’t know why people are interacting with the business, little can be inferred about their actions. Some transactional (clickstream) tools infer intent — stacking one inference on another — the potential for erroneous conclusions exponentiates. Knowing the intent is also useless without the transaction — there is no way to truly assess the say/do gap (which is often significant).
• Feedback Loops
  While most of what we’re talking about here can be considered feedback, this is called out to address two specific goals: gathering data from all the touchpoints and intentionally designing better loops in the touchpoints. This is a huge area of focus: key touchpoints are typically buried in divergent/competing organizations (website, customer service, call center, sales, marketing — for employees, the touchpoints of interaction are less well-defined). Coordinating a total experience and the feedback associated with all touchpoints is a major undertaking. Often the touchpoints don’t gather relevant feedback, they focus too much on ‘resolving’ an issue and not ’solving’ it. The ’solving’ of repeated issues doesn’t happen where there is no awareness. Awareness comes from the synthesis and sharing of the findings.
• Usability Studies
  I’m not an advocate of usability studies because they are isolated from many relevant factors, are often laden with prescribed intents, and people tend not to be as ‘honest’ as is needed. If they’ve already been done, leverage the relevant findings. Most real ‘usability’ issues can be identified via the other methods. Usability studies may still be valid for production models that rely on major releases (as opposed to the continuous change of 2.0) or for situations where no other form of research is possible.
• Ethnographic Discovery
  One of the best ways to gather relevant context — observing and/or talking to people as they engage in an activity — it can provide rich insight. There is often relevant contextual findings gathered during projects, but it is rarely synthesized/packaged and made available for others (it often gets buried, repurposed as requirements — focusing on the ‘what’ not the ‘why’).

Most companies I’ve been exposed to, either:

• Address none of these to any real degree
• Focus on Transactional Analytics only (e.g. clickstream)
• Focus on some aspect of several, but in isolation from each other
• Rely on ‘market research’ methods (ineffective here)
• Fail to collectively capture, synthesize and leverage the findings

The goal is to bring together relevant facts to inform discovery (the possibilities) that then lead to design — especially adaptive design to support individuals interacting with or on behalf of a business. Such facts are often difficult to find and difficult to effectively interpret and leverage — the barriers to ‘use’ are too high. Lowering these barriers is game-changing.

Various technologies (esp. web analytics) often include dashboards. Such dashboards include relevant data but they often include data focused on Search Engine Optimization and performance, which is of lesser relevance here.

For this model there’s potential for a collection (a dashboard might be one form) with related details and views that continuously offer and highlight new findings across various touchpoints. A more 2.0 approach would bring the facts into the context they’re related to, featuring (draw attention to via teasers) certain findings in tidbits, leading to more detail. Set up as an open ’social’ collection, individuals can share their discoveries and be the storytellers of what they’ve witnessed by both introducing new discovery findings or commenting on the data gathered from the touchpoints: a conversation flowing on the stream of work.

By bringing together the ‘witness’ of both automated touchpoints and human reports, the health of the business machine is given a ‘voice’ — the implicit becomes more explicit, providing a context and a means to:

• Suggest new actions or changes
  (inherently different than the ‘idea’ model for innovation)
• Validate proposed changes

If an E2.0 initiative does not include provisions for such context, wherein does adaptation occur? If not adaptive, is it 2.0?

Comments (8)

E2.0 Blogcast: July 31, 2009

July 31, 2009 at 11:30 am · Filed under Collaboration, Culture, KM, Social Media

A brief survey of recent Enterprise 2.0 posts (title links clickable).

…How Knowledge Must Be Applied

Colleague Bill Ives adds his own perspectives from his experience to one of my posts on his personal blog. His experiences seem to reinforce mine.

Social Media Advice for Businesses

While Bill Ives already covered this, it’s worth repeating. Former FFB colleague, Euan Semple, was filmed in a series of short pieces to share his thoughts on Social Media within the enterprise. Euan’s perspectives are always quite sound, based on his own experiences bringing Enterprise 2.0 solutions to bear. The series includes 15 segments (each, just over a minute).

It’s clearly a great reference to point others to.

Enterprise 2.0: We Got it All Wrong — a Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding

The human factor is what powers the enterprise, not the procedures.

The major question mark this piece raises for me is the concept of emergent consensus. What we haven’t figured out yet is how this will work. For E2.0 people are busy — unless you throw them all into a room together, it is not likely that they will collectively give attention to a particular issue. This still needs some study — which issues are that important that they need such a focus (which is expensive), will the relevant facts be available for a decision to be made? [the list goes on]

The Smartest Guy in the Room vs. Teamwork

Based on my experiences in the recent past I’m often left saying, “Trust? What’s that?” Because our financial mechanisms aren’t focused on such things, I’d contend that this is a huge issue that kills productivity and adds to project failure. I’d also contend that if HR wanted to really add value they’d be heavier on ‘behavioral’ consultants to bring into teams.

“Once you have been part of an Agile team it is hard, maybe impossible, to go back to a dysfunctional team. In the Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team the core foundation for TEAMing is TRUST. I assert that this issue is the same in social media, or collaborative communities online, where we must find tools and take risks to establish the trust between ourselves and our potential teammates. When the TRUST is threatened the entire TEAM is threatened.

It’s only through TRUST is the team willing to have CONFLICT. And without the ability to disagree the TEAM cannot work through difficult tasks”

Be sure to check out the diagram — it tells a phenomenal story, as well.

Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Best Practices from Yakabod

While product focused, colleague Bill Ives brings out relevant points:

“Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support.“

Are you listening technology providers? There’s a larger picture here that has to be addressed. I will say that I do not agree with much of what they’re recommending (perhaps that’s a post worth working on). It’s less a matter of disagreeing, but things like “They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful” is a goal but not a focus — it’s achieved by other means.

Footnotes

This seems to have turned into a bit of a Bill Ives celebration. Purely incidental — or maybe Bill just covers really relevant stuff.

I did not cover @dhinchcliff’s assessment of the E2.0 market — because it’s not about the technology — but it’s a great general reference.

Comments (6)

Mining Twitter – Citizen Journalism in a New Form

July 30, 2009 at 12:25 pm · Filed under NPR, Public Media, Public Radio, Twitter

Comments (6)

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands (SM) Community: Part Two Twitter and Summary

July 30, 2009 at 3:49 am · Filed under Event Announcements

This is the second part of my interview with Ben Foster speaking about Allstate’s efforts in social media. I think the Allstate effort represent a best practice example of social media adoption and, at the same time, Ben acknowledged that these are new media and no one has all the answers so they are engaging in a lot of experimentation. In the first part we discussed how they got started and their experiences with blogs on the Good Hands (SM) Community site. Now we turn to Twitter.

Bill: Let’s take the social media topic and bring it over to Twitter. With blogs you are writing in ways that people are more used to doing, as you tend to write in paragraphs. Now with Twitter it is a new communication channel with the 140 character limit. In looking at your Twitter feed I see that it has a lot of useful information with many links. How did you get to this point?

Ben: There are three people who run the Good Hands Twitter feed: myself, Amit Wadehra, Strategy and Content Manager and Jennifer Jankowski, who is the Good Hands (SM) Community Manager. As my grandmother said, the only way to learn something is to do it. That applies twenty fold in social media. Amit and I have our own Twitter accounts. We experiment on our own personal accounts to see what works well and what does not, what gets retweeted and what gets clicks.

We try to focus on a framework for the use of Twitter. For example, you would be surprised how many people just retweet something without checking it out. We stress that you need to look at the link and make sure it is worthy. We have a checklist that asks, “Is the link something that consumers will value?”, “Is it coming from a reputable source?, etc.

Bill: So you experiment on your personal account and then apply the lessons learned to the Good Hands (SM) Community account?

Ben: Correct, but we also experiment on the Good Hands (SM) Community account. For example, is it good to do a #FollowFriday. Does this help or hurt with readership? We know it is a common practice. We know people do it on personal accounts, but is it appropriate on a company account? We do not want to appear “spammy”. We try to look at the impact of actions using things like hashtags, for example, so we try to make informed content decisions, not just guess.

Bill: How do you look at the result of actions?

Ben: One way is to note the number of followers before and after an action. This is not an exact science but it helps. You also look at the number of clicks on links. For example, right after we tweeted on something from @FrugalDad we got a number of new followers. We gave some context to the FrugalDad tweet and it worked. We also experiment with such things as best time of day to tweet on topics.

Bill: You mentioned some experiments you have done. Let’s look a little closer at the results. Let’s take the hashtags for example. What lessons did you learn?

Ben: They are very useful for experienced users but not necessary for new users. If you just search for “Personal Finance” for example, you will get different stuff than “#PersonalFinance” which can contain a lot of ”Hashtag Spam”. However, lots of people have queries set up that rely on hashtags. So you really have to do both. However, we realize that some of our community members are not the most Twitter savvy so we do not want to throw them off with something that looks like computer code, like “#PersonalFinance” which can create confusion. We want to properly address our community and this requires experimentation.

Bill: I found that it depends on the topic. It works well for locations so if I put in a hashtag Boston I am likely to get some results or even hashtag the Boston NBA team, the Celtics. These are things people are likely to follow. It does not work as well for some other things.

Ben: I agree. We also try to monitor how frequently we tweet, especially on a common topic, so we do not appear to be spamming. We want to engage in a dialog but not clog the channel.

Bill: What are some of the other lessons learned?

Ben: One thing that works well is to have multiple people involved. They each bring their own perspective: we each subscribe to different blogs, we talk to different people, so there is a broader perspective. We have also found good content through StumbleUpon. We want to avoid RTing something that others are doing. The randomness of StumbleUpon often brings novel content. Another thing is finding a url shortener with great metrics. Bit.ly works well for us as it gives good stats. It can tell us the number of clicks per hour, per day, and locations. We are a US focused company so we want to see the location. It also gives the total number of clicks, as well as the number you generate so we can look at overall popularity.

We are also looking at our follower/following strategy. We are looking now to follow people who are not only interested in our content, but also provide us with useful information to share with our followers. We are not following people simply to generate more followers for ourselves. So we carefully follow those who follow us. If they feel like they would benefit from our content or if they surface great content, they provide as much value as those who follow us. To find people to follow we look at resources like WeFollow. It has people listed by topics. We look at the top people in the relevant topics and figure out if their tweets are relevant to our community. We decide if we would we want to retweet their feeds and gain insights from them that would be useful to our followers. We also look at the number of clicks on their tweets to see what people are interested in. We are moving slowly here because this is an experience where we want to learn the best strategies by doing them. We also follow some of our agents who are putting out interesting stuff.

Bill: Thanks for sharing your experiences and experimentation. Has this experience been helpful and what has been the benefit to Allstate of your social media activity.

Ben: It has been very helpful. It provides another channel to connect with customers and other consumers and this connection is aligned with our strategic vision, as I mentioned at the start. We are able to hear from them their concerns, either directly or from others who are also listening to consumers. We also feel that social media are here to stay so we want to learn about it as much as possible so we will be better prepared to make effective use of it as the usage becomes more pervasive.

Bill: How has it been received within Allstate?

Ben: We have great support from senior management. They recognized the value of Social Media and began this effort by setting up the new division with a Presidential level leader. This was a clear signal of support to the organization, and that support has continued. I think this senior level support is essential for this type of effort and it is much appreciated.

Bill: Thanks for sharing your experiences and I look forward to following your next steps.

Comments (13)

Allstate’s Social Media Experimentation and Adoption Experiences Through the Good Hands Community: Part One – Background and Blogs

July 29, 2009 at 8:16 pm · Filed under Event Announcements

I heard Ben Foster speaking about Allstate’s efforts in social media at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference and was impressed with what they are doing. Here is a video of the panel. I wanted to learn more abut their efforts and especially the social media adoption issues they faced and how they addressed them.

I think the Allstate effort represents a best practice example of social media adoption and, at the same time, Ben acknowledged that these are new media and no one has all the answers so they are engaging in a lot of experimentation. I like their willingness to experiment in a meaningful way and to look at the results. Ben said that Allstate feels that social media are here to stay. You learn best by doing and so they want to become knowledgeable now so they will be prepared for the time soon when the social media will be even more pervasive.

I interviewed Ben over the phone and it made sense to provide the results in our own words.

Bill: What led to the creation of the community?

Ben: It started the middle of last year. Our leadership has the strategic vision of putting the customer at the center of all that we do. With this vision in mind they set up a new Social Networking division and brought in Desirée Rogers, a well-known leader at the President level to run this division originally for our financial services group and later for the entire corporation.

We started by studying consumer problems. What we really wanted to do was stay customer focused and not be a cure chasing a disease. We did not want to be just another company throwing up a Facebook site or starting Twitter because the tools were becoming popular and we could say we were doing it also. We wanted to provide value.

Once we had a strategy worked out, we started the build phase early this year. We wanted to understand what types of content people would be interested in before we selected the tools. The outcome was Allstate’s Good Hands (SM) Community site which features four components:

Making a Difference – Share your ideas about making a difference in your community

All Things Wheels – Share your ideas on how to be safe and smart about what you drive

Daily Spending – Share your ideas about managing and tracking your spending

Personal Finance – Share your ideas about protecting and planning for your future

Bill: What is the background and rationale for this site?

Ben: We wanted to share information that helps people live responsibly by protecting what they have and preparing for what might come next. The site includes blog posts and discussion forums within each of the four themes. The site allows people to share ideas about “keeping families safe, saving money and preparing for what’s next.” In addition, we have a Good Hands (SM)  Community Twitter site to surface content around the four themes.

We also have an Allstate Twitter site that is run by Marcia Hansen from our Direct Marketing group. This is the official face of the brand. She shares content and responds to people talking about Allstate in Twitter.

The Good Hands Community Twitter account is specific to content around our four themes. It is not marketing focused, that content is available on other Allstate sites. You do not directly get Allstate quotes here. Instead, we cover the issues people are facing today around our four themes and offers stories about others’ experiences.

We have bloggers recruited from Allstate who were already writing blogs or had interests in these themes. They provide content from their experiences.

Bill: Were there any issues in getting these people recruited and then started in the right direction?

Ben: Our biggest challenge was getting the right type of content that fit the themes and objectives of the site. We wanted it to be the right level of quality and be interesting to our readers. We did not say, “Write about anything you want.” We helped them focus on certain issues by posing questions raised in consumer research that they could address. This enabled them to write useful posts.

We partnered with people who had done consumer research across the organization to understand what issues people are concerned about. We used this as stimuli for content. We said to our bloggers, “Here are the issues people are concerned about. Here is the reason why. Here are some of the details.” We asked them to write content that helps people think differently about the problems. We asked them to write open-ended posts to encourage conversation.

To help get the bloggers going in the right direction, it helped to get as much customer research as possible.

Bill: I think this is really a smart approach. You were recruiting people who knew the answers. They just did not necessarily know the right questions. You were able to motivate and focus them by giving them the questions and more background from research.

Ben: Yes. Then we tracked the response to specific posts. We were pleased at the interest, for example, in some of the posts about making a difference in your community that were more inspirational.

Bill: Now let’s take the same topic and bring it over to Twitter.

The extended answers will be covered in part two of this interview which wil appear tomorrow.

Comments (10)