I’m on my way back from the show, lots of enthusiastic and bright folks up there in Toronto. Damn cold too – at least for this Florida-based guy. But I managed to hang in there with a coat I bought for a trip to Edmonton with Bryan Eisenberg back in January of 2001 or so it wasn’t nearly as cold in Toronto as it was for that trip though!
Anyway, great show as usual and thanks to Jim S. and Andrea H. for inviting me to participate in so many ways. Even more thanks are probably due to Matt and Fanny because they are behind the curtain and are doing all the work!
Wizards they are.
The biggest news from the show I was exposed to was the awarding of a patent to Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution for his technology enabling any “programmable device” – phone, web site, car, etc. – to look at user behavior and know “how that person is thinking”. This could be a good thing.
Not sure exactly where this goes, but clearly if this idea works out, services like Touch Clarity will be considered “dumb” by comparison. I mean, parsing a referrer is one thing, knowing how I am thinking is quite another. “How” meaning (to simplify) what cranial modes the user is in as they are interacting with the device.
I won’t attempt further explanation, see here and pay particular attention to the C, B/e, M matrix thoughts.
I’ve known Joseph for some time now and he’s an incredibly bright guy – and very entertaining to talk (OK, argue!) with. Now that he has a patent, I’m sure we will start to hear more details on what is required for implementation and (some) idea of how it works.
Any comments on this development?
On Monday, I taught the DAA BaseCamp Intro Level Course to a pack of 40 fine people who wanted to learn more about the basics of web analytics. To any of those people who are now blog subs, thanks for the treat of being your instructor and I very much appreciate your kind words on the “user experience”.
Then as everybody else rolled in, there was of course the opportunity to have spirited (in several ways) discussions about everything web analytics until 2 AM. Great to see Braden, Hosam, Judah and Raquel from the DAA Education Committee team as well as all the usual show management and speaker suspects.
Tuesday I presented a session on making web analytics invaluable to C-Level people. One of the issues web analytics faces with C-Level folks is they don’t really care much about history; they get paid for thinking about the future. So unless you change your mindset and start doing some prediction – like the BI folks do – then it’s likely the C-Level folks will continue to be under-whelmed by your reports.
What does this kind of future-oriented reporting look like?
Well, for those of you with some experience under your belt, it looks like this, though I dumbed it down a bit for a general audience presentation to a simpler model closer to this.
Comments on any these ideas? If you were at the Toronto show, what did you think of experience?
Howdy,
Sorry I didn’t see this sooner. I’ve been a little busy, I guess.
My great hope is that our technology (Evolution Technology or “ET” for short) will be a good thing. I’d have to say it’s the great hope of everyone involved with NextStage, truthfully. We work pretty hard at keeping it a “good” thing, meaning, like Hippocrates, we work to first do no harm.
Will other services be considered “dumb” by comparison? You know, that was never something that entered my mind when I developed the prototype or went after the patent. Originally I created it as a learning tool, something that could rapidly recognize how an individual best internalizes information (ie, learns and remembers) then modify content on the fly so that to match their learning style.
It didn’t occur to me until much later that “learning” could also mean “branding”, etc., or that there were marketing elements to it. And yes, recognizing and responding to “cranial modes” (never heard it put that way before) is one piece of what it does. In that sense one can consider it a symbiot although the more correct (and less known) term is “bioginot”.
It’s been one heck of a ride, I can tell you that.
The {C,B/e,M} matrix is the 100 mile high way of thinking about it. Not sure if I talked about this in eMetrics Toronto or San Francisco or some other venue so bare with me as I have a go at it here.
The {C,B/e,M} Matrix is, quite literally a shorthand notation for how people interact with their world. What is covered is very rich and detailed and can be summed up into three basic categories; Cognitive (“How do they think? What do they think about?”), Behavioral/effective (“What do they do that demonstrates how they think?” and the way I use the word “Behavioral” has next to nothing to do with how the term is used in the industry today, me thinks) and Motivational (“Why do they think the way they do? Why do they demonstrate it the way they do?”).
These three elements are so closely tied together that they can be mistaken for one another. Also (in my opinion) knowing one without knowing the others amounts to a boobie prize. Interesting, perhaps and useful, no. For example, knowing someone’s responses to a survey tells you nothing about their motivation for taking the survey or how that motivation is altering their behaviors while responding to the survey. At best you might have a rough (very rough unless you’re remarkably adept at designing surveys) idea of their cognitive state while taking the survey. Even so, you don’t know their cognitive state that led to accepting their motivation that… However, if you know their cognitive state while they’re taking the survey and simultaneously recognize their motivations then you have their current behaviors and know
* what will motivate these same behaviors in the future
* which motivations are matched to which cognitive states
* how to trigger emotional responses
* …
It gets amazingly rich amazingly fast.
You think I’m incredibly bright? I’m flattered. I tend to think of myself as dogged. Some people have called me steadfast. There are three degrees to this concept and which degree is assigned to an individual often depends on their social distance from the source of the appellation. For example, “I’m steadfast, you’re stubborn, he’s too stupid to know any better.”
Hope you’re laughing.
Argue? I hope we’ve never argued. Discussed, sure and perhaps disagreed, but argued? Please say it ain’t so.
Entertaining? That I can live with, and thank you.
Please let me know if you have any other ETish topics you’d like me to discuss. Happy to do so. And I promise to get back and respond to TheFutureOf comments. Soon. – Joseph