The Fly on the Wall in a Consumer’s Brain

Om brings up interesting points regarding privacy and a “cached life”: our paths and thoughts are on servers all over the place. Clearly users of web applications can be tracked, aggregated, analyzed and put into buckets of commonality. There are companies (e.g. Tacoda) that purposely deliver you ads/content based upon what they know about you (or a pre-defined profile they may have about people like you).

Don Dodge (formerly of Napster now at Microsoft) brings up a distinction between the cached life (online world) and the observed life (although he didn’t say it, I’m guessing he means the offline world, see the Comment section in Om’s blog). This brings up a somewhat contrarian thought for me. There is information we believe, or at least I believe, should be inherently private (search history, my iTunes downloads) and information we purposely make public (blogs).

Many marketers realize that blogs are a rich and open source of observational data. There are two main methods of extracting that data: Read each blog entry, or subscribe to a service that aggregates the information into meaningful chunks of insight.

For those marketers who don’t yet follow how people write about your products, services, and company in the blogospehre, Randy Moss recently presented on the concept and importance of apophenia. Marketers are crazy not to take advantage of this open source of consumer attitudes, insight, and behavior offered by bloggers.  Compare your market research and behaviorial data with information pulled from the blogosphere.  You might just “seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”.

Great (additional) Uses of RSS

I love RSS. Both in the simplicity and applicableness it offers to content creators and businesses. Basement.org has a list of a few potential uses. Anyone considering using RSS for marketing applications should check out pheedo and feedburner.

Colloborative News Sites Allows You to See Potential Trends

Uber blogger Steve Rubel mentions 180° news and digg as two collborative news sites. I’ve been part of the beta over at newsvine.com and actually prefer their interface vs 180’s gmail-like GUI. All three of these sites offer Marketers insight into how consumers of traditional online Media content prioritize, add, and comment/link on the news. I haven’t done it yet, but I would love to add my own tracking/trending information to specific stories to see how they may gain velocity over time. This could be quite helpful to brand/product owners to track their own interests (or those of the competition).

One Not to Miss, Maybe

Jason Ruspini has the head’s up on a forth coming book by Nassim Taleb (his website is a treasure trove for a geek like me). I couldn’t get the PDF to open, so I guess I’ll just have to buy the book

Hopefully Taleb’s new book The Scandal of Prediction “The Black Swan” (I’ve been corrected that the Scandal of Prediction is a chapter in that upcoming book) will be as good as his last “Fooled by Randomness”.

The Only Thing Stolen Was My Time

On my flight back from Chicago, I read Steve Cone’s “Steal These Ideas: Marketing Secrets That Will Make You a Star”.

If you don’t know anything about Marketing, then I suppose you’ll find parts of this book helpful.  If you are a Marketing professional, or interested in Marketing as a profession, here’s what you need to know: A good title and positive reviews on Amazon can sell anything.

This book was a HUGE disappointment.

I must be the only one who doesn’t get why this distilled marketing-common-sense even made it to print.   Steve Forbes, Faith Popcorn, Jon Linen, Al Ries, and Adam Aron all gushed about the book (as did most reviewers on Amazon, a subject for a different posting).

Ahead of the Curve in Chicago

Spent the day at the AMA’s Ahead of the Curve – High Tech Trends in Marketing. Although I was a speaker (the much coveted last spot of the day), I was fortunate to be on the roster with Stowe Boyd (launching his new blog). He is one of the few people I’ve met that can succintly describe the future of media, and why the future is different than what many traditional marketers want. For those that aren’t prepared, or plan to keep their head in the sand, watch out!

Chris Carfi, Bill Flitter, and Randy Moss (missed you a dinner bro!) did a great job of identifying trends and the implications of those trends not only for marketers, but anyone interested in the concept of the social web. In a small world story, Randy referenced Dana Boyd whom I recently discovered and highly recommend ALL marketers read her insights. Not only does she research a fascinating aspect of Web 2.0, she is a lucid writer and provocative thinker.

An intersting insight I walked way with: what is the correct paradigm regarding RSS from a marketer’s perspective?

On a side note, I’m not much of a steak eater (we eat lots of Bison in Colorado), but the Filet at the Chop House was the BEST I’ve ever had (hat tip to Charles Smith). Highly recommended to those visiting Chicago.

How does a four letter word change the conversation?

We were fortunate enough to be part of an interesting article today in Business Week, worth the read (disclosure: I work for Umbria). Aside from the obvious questions regarding privacy, applications of knowledge, and past examples, I was a little surprised about what was missing: Why can it be done?

I don’t mean the math and modeling parts which are well covered in the article, but why can it be done at all? The “it” in question is why can humans and the encapsulation of their actions and thoughts be so easily converted into math (the 4 letter word) and be both accurate and predictable? As a species, are we not as multi-dimensional as we believe we are?

Perhaps a question better posed to apophenia.