Will access to all your web traces lead to the marketeers wet dream, increase long tail or just create privacy problems?

One of the most important aspects of the future is to build a relation ship with each customer and thus build a loyalty based on always exceeding expectations and deepened relationship through permissions.
One such interesting initiative is AttenTV that collects the click-stream of people and sells it to marketeers. The purpose is to get an even closer look to the inner being and what they prefer.

This idea is good but could be improved with some small adjustments. First of all just selling the combined click-streams adds little value to the advertiser. First of all it is impossible to build a personally relationship, it just alienates the customer and creates a feeling of safety at the company. The feeling of safety is just imaginary since you will just be looking in the past, not what will happen in the future.

It also misses the notion of the long tail. Analyzing all the click-streams it would be possible to find patterns and based on my own historical click-streams it should be possible to find the strange and not expected conjunctions between different people. Creating such a long-tail of knowledge will enable both the advertiser and the distributor to offer better alternatives and keeping the storage of most popular lower. The biggest value however comes if you are using the click-stream to start building a long-lasting relationship. As additional value you can start advising of alternative services depending on the click-stream.

The biggest value from AttenTV comes from the ability to build long lasting relationships, offer a more complete offering since the long-tail will tell us what customer wants here and now. Finally this will preserve privacy since only companies that you have an established relationship will be able to make use of your click-stream. I would also suppose there will be some kind of reward for participating in this exercise.

An interesting idea with some potential if it is modified a bit.

The boomerang effect

There are several services we all buy that can be easily doubled if the company providing the service dare ask for the return. Stefan Engeseth points it out very clearly in his June issue newsletter. For example if you are going by taxi from A to B it would be smart by the taxi company to ask for the return trip directly. The same applies to restaurants which could offer a discount if the next similar meal is bought directly when the first is bought.

When leaving McDonalds I should be asked if I wanted the same meal the next time and when this time is. Using telecom services like location and SMS it would be easy to help retail to add the boomerang effect to their business. The good thing is that it also helps the company becoming more agile and closer to their customers, almost what Stefan would call ONE.

Use discounts to get the next order (at Arlanda Express you get 50% discount on the return ticket if you buy both at the same time). Use telecom services to confirm, collect permissions, and use telecom services to remind the user when it is getting closer. You can also start collecting information on who is buying what and what products they buy at retail stores. From the permissions and what they actually buy it is possible to create a big tail and good predictions for the future.

Let's through some boomerang!

Security, for whom?

I've always been curious on why things are what they are. One such area is security. We get more and more cameras, guards and safe doors around us. Gated communities are a growing fact even in Sweden where people used to lock the door and leave the key on a nail above it. But is security everything? Are we have happy if we feel secure?

I don't think so. I see it as a trend towards more of the same. One guard makes you want a another guard in another place. And so on until you have cameras and guards everywhere. Will it make you secure and safe?

Let me take an example. When I visited Israel last week there were armed guards everywhere and at all shopping malls they searched your car and asked what you should do here. Did they expect the terrorist to say "I'm going to blow this place up"? And the search was so bad it made me feel even more insecure. If I want to bomb the place it is easy to hide a bomb and get it in the building. On the other hand I got lost when walking in Tel Aviv and suddenly I was in the middle of a park with no lights at all. That made me feel really scared especially since there were men standing in the shrubbery watching me. So you have armed guards everywhere and no lights for everyday safety, it does not make sense to me.

Another thing that does not make sense is the new airport rules and the increased security everywhere. When leaving Copenhagen or Stockholm you have to wait for 30 min up to 1.5 hour to get through security. And then you are not allowed to carry any liquids of any kind unless it is less than 100ml and fits into a one liter plastic bag. The procedures in Copenhagen and most of Europe are from OK to very good with a few exceptions. They are Spain, Portugal and Madeira.

The worst so far is Madeira where they didn't even bother to look through me when the metal detector went off. In Spain they are quite ignorant and sloppy in their search. In Barcelona I went to the wrong luggage terminal and have to go through security once more to get back into the right terminal and go to luggage pick-up. Without showing anything else than my passport. That's an excellent way for terrorists getting in a lot of liquid bombs!

This was before leaving Israel. After having to go through their security procedures, there is no way in hell to get anything past their checks. This is what I call security and it made me feel real safe.

So the feeling this gives me is that security done wrong increases insecurity, both real and experienced, done right is expensive to all parties. There are no easy ways of doing this, but just having a lot of armed guys out there does not increase it, rather the opposite. It can make some people feel secure and then they don't have to take responsibility for their own actions. The lesson from the non-lit up park is that let people see for themselves and then they can make a judgment. Hiding in the dark is only going to increase insecurity.

Finally I strongly believe that people who feel hope and that there is a future are less probable to make any actions. The most important area is to create hope through education in our time. Learning and education is the key here I think. Instead of investing all resources into security measures, spend resources on education and improvement in learning techniques.

The ultimate ONE company - MyFootballClub

You could read about the newest football club in the latest issue of the Economist (Here comes's Fanchester United. This club is unique in the way it is managed and controlled. Each shareholder can vote for which players should play in the next game and which should be sold and bought.

The concept is absolutely fantastic. You will create a club with real fan involvement and engagement. They have to visit the homepage often, have to keep updated with the results and they really care who's playing. Furthermore the players really feel they need to deserve the respect of the fans, not just the manager. Since there are so many fans, no one will get selected because they have the manager's eyes.

I would call this the first true ONE company ever. For the first time the fans and customers are invited to participate in the everyday life of the club. I will of course become a member and we'll see how it goes.

Other favorites when it comes to customer involvement in John Fluevog who let customers design their own shows or accessories and then they are shared as Open Source to the public. You can read more about John and his shoes on Fluevog Shoes. Besides this he has wonderful shoes as well :-D

If you are interested in more about ONE I can recommend Stefan Engeseth (Detective Marketing).

Missionaries in Change

"Everything changes" is a well used saying. We believe that it is only today that everything changes and that the speed has increased. Looking back in history one can see that there has been no period of time when nothing changed and everything stood still. Roman empire was changing all the time, from internal initiated change and from external pressure. I think that the reason we talk and experience so much change today is that the media and information is much more available today. Thus we get to hear about new and different things all the time. This creates a pressure for change just because we hear so much about how others have done it. The other influencing factor for faster change is competitive pressure. Since competition is much more fierce today people, organizations and countries have to change to stay ahead of competition.

Why am I writing this? Because today I read an ad from the Swedish IT and Management consultancy company Connecta who claimed to be Missionaries in Change. Interesting that organizations see themselves as missionaries in general and in change specifically. Since everything has changed all the time in history, why do we need missionaries in change? Do I sound like an old fashioned uncle now? Of course we need to change, we have always done it and it is an integral part of human mindset. Why then missionaries in change?

The picture they used to illustrate their change mission was with a consultant holding a bee-frame where bees were flying around in the air. And then saying "When it seems impossible". I think they want you to get the picture of it being impossible to handle a lot of bees flying around. But for a trained bee keeper it is an everyday task you do without much thought. So why is it impossible? Doesn't it depend on the persons mindset, expectation and experience?

My take on this is that change is inevitable, it has always happened, goes faster today because media is reporting it, and it depends on your mindset, expectation and experience.

Viral Marketing and Two-way communication

In a recent article in HBR (Viral marketing for the real world) Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti dives deep into on how to get Viral Marketing to work even if you don't get the viral part self sustaining. Which means that the reproduction rate is lower than 1 and that it will die eventually. However they launch the interesting idea to use viral marketing techniques to reach a wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. So combining the techniques of traditional mass marketing with viral marketing generates a much better result from the invested marketing dollars they conclude.

This sounds perfect and a pragmatic way into using a technology that is hard to master (getting the viral message loose IS hard). However I miss two things here. First of all you miss the opportunity to get to know the respondents of your mass marketing effort. They only send the message on, and you know as little as you did before. And the ones they send it to also are totally anonymous. Why not combine the mass marketing and viral marketing with permission based marketing. Take the opportunity to collect permissions when you have them interested. That way you can continue send marketing messages their way without having to be dependent on expensive mass marketing campaigns. You can then continue using viral techniques to repeat each marketing message sent to your collected group of permissions.

The next accelerator is to use digital services to actually foster viral tendencies in the target group. For each person the message is sent to they receive payment in form of digital services like Video-On-Demand, top-up of the pre-paid mobile account, etc.

This leads towards becoming ONE with your customers as expressed by Stefan Engeseth in his book ONE.

Information Ecology

I once read a book which mentioned the word "Information Ecology". It didn't talk much about the topic and ever since I've been thinking about what it means. Taste the words ... Information ... Ecology.

Information can be so much and so little. Useful and useless. Mean something and be totally false. Data is something we collect with our five senses and interpret with our filters or glasses. The remaining data could be called information. Already here it is filtered and with the right filters it is actually worth more than in the raw form. But if you have the wrong filters or draw the wrong conclusions it becomes false and will certainly lead you wrong. So the data has now become information. It is what we do with the information that determines the outcome and result. Finally information may turn into knowledge if we manage to embrace it and make the information our own and take it to our heart.

The process of turning information into knowledge is a sort of ecology. Ecology for me is how a thing circulates in a closed system, interacting with other artifacts in that system. In the interaction process it gives and takes parts from the surrounding environment and the context in which it exists. For example information is collected in one place. It then traverses different paths between people who act in different contexts. Depending on the circumstance for each person that person is affected by the information which is interpreted and filtered by his/her experience and taken into consideration. The person gives the information to the next person who handles the information (now changed a little bit, at least interpreted) according to his/her experience. The information may be stored at different stages in this process, so you can find the same information in different stages of interpretation at the same time when searching.

Does this makes sense? I don't know yet, I probably have to think more of it. But my general thought is to view "Information Ecology" as the process information traverses and becoming transformed as it is used and interpreted in different contexts/environments. This is the ecology of information. Hopefully it will come to use as it moves around and information is removed and added. Finally it becomes not only information, but also Knowledge, the key to understand the world around us.

Does culture matter?

To be able to answer this question one has to ask himself what culture is? There is probably a very good explanation on Wikipedia that I don't care to read. To me culture can be defined as the thought model that governs how one acts and reacts to things in the outer world. Or even better that governs how people think other will think and thus acts according to how they believe others will react.

Let me take one simple example. How close to the other person do you stand when having a conversation? In Sweden it's about 60-80 cm while in India I've been told it's less than 30 cm. The story goes that one Swede and one Indian had a discussion. The Indian tried to keep the distance of 30 cm while the Sweden moved away to keep the 80 cm. The were basically dancing backwards across the room. Very funny!!!

In groups of people with the same or very similar culture society is starving on input and new thoughts. Since everyone is acting according to how they believe everyone else would expect them to act no or very few new thoughts and ideas emerges. Whereas in groups of people with many different people from all over the world (or at least with a vast different background) there are always people able to see things that others miss because of their cultural filter.

This is way large groups in the world have such big problems. Arabic countries have very little input from other parts of the world. In China the Han-people are very homogeneous and up until very recently have not had much influence from abroad. Other parts are experiencing very dramatic idea generation and are very creative. Look at Europe for example with its large set of cultures and value systems. There has always been one part of Europe that has seen a new thing that was in the blind-spot for the others. The same for the east and west coast of US. A lot of immigrants from all over the world have created a boiling cacophony of ideas and values. You can see how many great companies that originates from these places.

The threat however to both Europe and US are xenophobia. Becoming afraid of strangers and stopping them from entering is major threat to this process. In the US they are trying to limit the number of green cards and foreign students. In Europe we're closing our borders and in almost every country there is a national party trying to get rid of foreigners to different degrees.

I believe it is of utterly importance that we keep US and Europe open to new people and new ideas. China and the Arabic countries has to follow and create a better mix of people, cultures and values to be able to boil a new soup for the future.

What have you achieved lately?

I usually sit down once every year to reflect on achievements and lessons learned the past year. It can be things that have been ongoing in my profession or in private life.

For example I managed a fairly large project which had a member of the steering committee that was always taking every chance to hinder progress. I became very frustrated with his objections and comments. It came to a point were I was feeling really bad and thought that I cannot lead projects. In that situation I consulted a former project manager colleague and we discussed what needs to be done in order to solve the issue at hand. We concluded that I had to think about his perspective and identify the information he needed. Of course one would like an executive manager to be able to pick the information he needed or if he misses some information be able to articulate that and ask for it. Also we concluded that I should try not to be to focused on what he said and didn't say. Of course all what this manager did was example of bad management, but I could choose between make my own career great or be a victim for the circumstance.

Anyway, in this process I also reflected upon the fact that I couldn't figure this out myself as others had already done before me. I mean there are people who seem to know already from the beginning what to do in a certain situation. It looks like it is embedded in their genes. Take Mozart as an example. He played better violin at age 4 than most people do after a whole life in training. How can this be possible? Is it only pure intelligence or is it something else? I don't really know to be honest, but I found an interesting article on Wired called What kind of genius are you?. In the article he concludes that there are two types of geniuses. One that sees from the beginning what shall be done and the rest is only implementation. Get it done basically. The second genius is the one that is developed over time. You make a move, take in the rest and improves the actions from the collected feedback. Personally I am a fond of the second type for two reasons. The first is of course that since I haven't done anything that will give me the Nobel Prize yet I have to trust that I will actually learn from my experience. The second reason is more compelling since it says that people can develop new skills over time and learn from them. In the end this is the most interesting since it will enable all of us normal people to actually develop some skills. We're not left with our starting ability to create great stuff, we can improve it! Actually I admire people more who have learned from past lessons than who trusts only the default skill set.

If you are interested about this I can also advice you of a recent article in Harvard Business Review called Discovering your authentic leadership.

The conclusion of this post is to urge you to reflect on your achievements. This is the only way to improve if your not born with an extraordinary ability. It is also the only way to develop your authentic leadership. So by reflecting over yourself you will by itself achieve new exciting things.

What is intelligence?

Many thoughts have been made on trying to define intelligence. What is it actually? And does our way of defining intelligence have anything to do with our culture? Some people say it would be defined otherwise if we were Chinese.

I think intelligence has a lot to do with personality. The way you act, think and prioritize has a lot to do with your personality. So if you are the type that does not plan a lot ahead might look unintelligent since you missed to take a certain event into consideration. On the other hand a person that always plans everything might be unable to handle exceptions. So what is then intelligence and what is mental models?

I once read a book by Stefan Engeseth called One (www.detectivemarketing.com) where he claims that 98% of all 2 years children have the potential of reaching above IQ 140. And only 2% of all 18 years old had the same potential. So what is happening between 2 and 18? Are we giving our children such bad conditions so they loose all that potential? Think of what could happen if we can find ways of closing that gap. What a wionderful world it would be, or would it? It might become a terrible place of overly intelligent people.

Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos investigates new methods of learning in their book "New learning revolution". It might be one step towards increasing the total intelligence in our society.

Finally I will just cover some thoughts by the Futurologist Ian Pearson (http://www.bt.com/sphere/insights/pearson/index.htm). He means that by the end of the 21st century machines will be smarter that humans and we can only hope that they will like to talk to us. As I'm also interested in AI and machine intelligence this would be fantastic if he is right. Perhaps I should switch career and start developing AI systems instead.

Brain dump

Imagine what you can do with 1.3kg of grey jelly? Some consider it a delicates and eat it under the most enjoying circumstances. Think of a monkey head with the skull cut open like a can.

I am very fascinated of what one can do with the brain and how it works. It is said that people who do "The knowledge" and becomes a taxi driver in London gets a bigger brain. All cells required to store all map data about all places in London makes the brain grow (see: http://sydsvenskan.se/varlden/article215336.ece). It is also said that both Beethoven and Einstein had marks inside their skulls from where the brain had grown in those particular parts used for imagining music and the theory of special and general relativity respectively. If this is true it is a quite exciting example of what the human body is capable of.

The brain can also make a fool of itself. In an HBR article called "Decisions and Desire", Jan 2006, the way we make decisions is discussed. In that article there were several very interested facts, one I will bring up here. A teenager makes decisions on the feeling. Afterwards when you ask why they did a certain thing, they don't know. The reason for this is that the decision centre in the forehead is not ready yet to make any decisions. It is confused with all other signals flowing in from other parts of the brain and body. In the wake of any clear decision making power it gives in for the strongest signal for the moment, usually the thing that you regret the day after. When a person reaches 20s the brain is usually ready for life. Isn't it strange that we require our youth to make such important decisions even if the brian in many cases is not able to make the best choice?