TMI

I'm hearing more and more commentators describe our age as one of "information overload" or "digital distraction". More enlightened commentators are noting that the evolution of the internet is such that we are becoming as likely to participate in the creation of information as we are to consume it and this is a good thing.

In an age of TMI (too much information) it becomes important for every consumer to be able to put filters in place. The first phase was the simple ones - information blockers for parents, SPAM filters etc. This has X in it, so I don't want it. The second phase is relevancy - filters that sift through content to determine - based on the user's expressed or unexpressed needs - whether the content should get through, or whether it is irrelevant.

The first phase is big business for the providers, and the second phase is a big challenge. Is keyword searching about relevancy? Search engines return an enormous amount of links and many are not relevant, so really its not a great relevancy filter. The reason is because the understanding of the need is very limited in a simple keyword search. The application must have a relationship with the user over time - to understand behavior, build a profile, create some settings, ask some questions. The search engines can only do so much with a keyword search, in terms of relevancy filtering. The future of relevancy and filtering in an age of TMI is having a long-term relationship with the user so that the system can figure out really what the user wants to see and to know, and can filter out everything else. A keyword search on Google is about word matching, not relevancy - so in many ways the search engines perpetuate the TMI problem, they don't solve it.

Change of Speed

Language is a public thing - no-one owns language, and no-one has to apply for any rights to use it. Not only that, we can change it at will. It's superradical (see..?).

Over the years, decades and centuries, language changes quickly; sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes very obviously. Watch a movie from the 1950s and you'll see a big difference in the use of phrases and words to modern movies. New words are invented, phrases die and acronyms won't go away. It's a mess.

365 Media is in the business of tracking and understanding information, and converting that into actionable intelligence. We're basically in the business of sifting through shifting sands to find specific treasures, fortunately we can just throw big servers at the problem once we have the digging tools in place. But that's not the problem.

Here's the thing - our job is getting harder because more and more people are talking, not because there is more content, but because the increase in the level of conversation means a faster rate of evolution for language. The more we talk, the more we change how we talk. Just see if you can understand anything teenagers are texting and posting.

Clever Turks

Crowd-sourcing offers great promise in the knowledge industry. At 365 Media we've been studying it for a couple of years now and we've used some online services such as MTurk on a number of projects (although mostly in a test sense). Now it can consider itself a real industry, because there's a conference about it in San Francisco today. Congratulations to everyone (in the crowd), I guess...

The core question to using crowd-sourcing is can you outsource some types of service work to large distributed, sometimes unknown, workforces and get a better return than building a dedicated, trained and expert team? We've built an application that enables us to engage and use outside knowledge workers. In this application we have a rigorous series of tests and screenings, and we have to maintain quite a high ratio of internal QA staff to external workers to be sure that nothing slips through that could damage the integrity of the information product that is being supported.

The original Mechanical Turk, after which Amazon named its trail-blazing online service, was basically a box with a robot - a Turk - sitting at a chessboard. The Turk would play chess against anyone from the audience and generally would win. The audience were thrilled - not only because it was a machine (it wasn't, there was a guy inside the box) but also because IT WON the games. The guy inside the machine was good at chess - that was as important as anything in the whole ruse. Imagine if the guy in the box didn't know the rules of chess!

In crowd-sourcing a task that needs any level of expertise then the crowd needs to have at least that level of expertise. At least.

Listening

I like Nigel Edelshain, even though I don't know him at all. He runs an organization called Sales 2.0 and I was persuaded by a colleague to subscribe to its newsletter a few months back. The persuasion came because Nigel wrote a piece that described sales 2.0 as the evolution of the sales process that involved a successful intersection of profiling (who to sell to), network (who you are connected to) and timeliness (what's relevant about now that will help your sales approach). I liked it because my company 365 Media is all about the NOW - finding information that happens now and converting it into business intelligence.

Anyway, I think the sales 2.0 idea is good - you should check it out. Don't tell Nigel I sent you, though, he doesn't know me.

The more I look at all the advice, though, the more I think that some of the fundamentals are missing. When I was trained in sales - at the Thomson Corporation back when there were budgets for week-long off-sites in crummy motels in Milton Keynes - the emphasis was all about LISTENING (and matching). Listen to your client, find out what they want, match it your service. After working in London for 12 years, I've now been working in the US for 10. I have a reasonably good picture of both cultures from a sales perspective.

I think there is a lack of listening in modern sales. What is the client's need? How does your questioning help them articulate their need? Timeliness on business intelligence (the guy is new to the job last week, for example, or the company just announced an expansion) is a good reason to pick up the phone or send a personalized note - but ultimately, the sale will happen if we listen to what the customer needs.

By the way, I'm not saying Nigel doesn't know this - I'm just saying that perhaps its the most important thing in sales, still.