Advertisers, Lawyers, Venture Capitalists and the future of Social Media

Just as advertisers and lawyers finally learn to adapt to Social Media, the brightest Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley, the same minds who gave birth to Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter, are feverishly crafting a more fearsome spawn — Groups.

Advertisers, Lawyers & Content

Advertisers & Lawyers should Fear Groups

 

In the Great Wave Off Kanagawa

1. Advertisers Spend Client Money to Push Huge Content Waves

In the heyday of old Media advertisers spent a lot of client money attempting to deliver customers to their clients and while they may have understood that half of their budgets were being wasted they didn’t know how to measure which half.

2. Lawyers Spend Client Money to Sort through Huge Content Waves

Despite the fact that very few documents are useful or admissable, lawyers are compelled to launch high cost and generally low ROI eDiscovery projects by their need to minimize Risk for their firm and their clients.

Groups will add considerable Risk to Advertisers and Lawyers.

Can technology save advertisers and lawyers?

  

 

No GROUP Access but IBM Watson Supercomputer Trumps 'humans' in Jeopardy

WATSON

Watson, recently highlighted in Jeopardy, is IBM’s latest and fastest computer and amazing when it comes to ‘reasoning’ and the mining of concepts and text. Watson may rule content and Jeopardy but is ineffective if members of trusted groups deny access to Watson because it is not in the ‘circle of trust’.

Groups Disrupt Advertising & Legal Models

If you haven’t already guessed ‘Groups’ is actually a class of software tools that facilitates the create of digital spaces where groups of people interact, get work done and then disband.

The impact of Groups on content creation, measures and trust is what advertisers and lawyers should fear.

Groups of ‘trusted’ members make it extremely difficult for advertisers to to deliver any content unless it is pulled in by a trusted group member. Regardless of the type of work done by the group, it is simultaneously a consumer, broker and creator of content and measures and effectively disrupts advertising business models.

eDiscovery in small trusted groups will be virtually impossible unless a group member surrenders all of the group content to lawyers which itself may be contradictory private non-disclosure contracts now used by lawyers to negotiate settlements or to privacy laws.

An interesting legal conundrum.

To understand the future of Groups we must start in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley Re-Engineers Evolution

In Silicon Valley venture capitalists influence corporate profits by shaping manufacturing and content creation standard to ensure the products they take to market are successfully propelled forward by a ‘matrix’ corporations much like a swarming brood that decends upon unsuspecting markets like billions of locust.

For those that may not know why Silicon Valley matters…

Quick History of Silicon Valley

Fields and groves of trees were soon overwhelmed by factories serving military and commercial manufacturers and the birthplace of venture capital innovation that powered; HP, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, the Internet browser, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and other well known corporations.

Silicon Valley is the heart of the Internet.

Quick History of the Internet

During the cold war the US military feared Russian missles and connected military and university computers to assess target risk. Complex calculations of potential missle flight paths were shared by many computers to speed up response analysis.

Shortly afterwards linked computers began to share email, exchange files and porn–the blueprint for the modern internet was born.

Venture Capitalists, Groups, Content and Trust

The internet perceived by most people when they view a browser is actually the world wide web or www and a small proportion of the ‘real internet’. Shortly after Netscape create the first visual brower Yahoo created the first highly successful commercial portal which was essentially a combination of a digital Yellow Pages and a business card listing.

Advertisers quickly determined that advertising budgets were better spent on Yahoo and a few years later Google helped get more advertisers to the internet by convincing more people to create content that would provide them ‘free’ advertising–the SEO model was born a few years later.

Evolution of Revolution

Yahoo was about people wayfinding in a huge directory and Google was about search optimization across millions of web sites though this caused stress to Venture Capitalists who needed more opportunities to provide Wall Street with opportunities for selling stocks of IPO’s or new companies going to the stock market.

Venture Capitalists saw that Google carved an private island inside the world wide web where corporations could advertise to people. VC’s then determined that offering people tools to advertise to each other would be event more profitable and soon formed the ‘social media’ islands where people joyfully spammed friends that were turned off by increasing amounts of spam delivered by search engine spiders and the advertisers that fed them. People were friendlier.

Group Tools that Rule

Twitter and Posterous are two of the three Group tools that I believe will lead the way to creating new opportunities and problems for advertisers and lawyers.

How do I know this?

Twitter allows members to follow or block other members en masse or create ‘private’ groups by combining features like lists, direct messages and # tags.

Posterous has recently announced a Groups focus which is extremely interesting as our success with Posterous is significant since we received 1,000 predictive analytics content ‘hits’ in 1 week for highly focused content by using the same Twitter-like Resonance technology used to synchronize 1,000 bloggers via simple Marketing Service Level agreements.

What is the third group tool that rules? Asana, at least for now.

Explore & Exploit Opportunities in Groups

Our experience includes the facilitation self-forming groups to deliver accelerated learning while simultaneously crafting trusted content focused Content and Web Strategies as well as Scenario, Business and Predictive Analytics.

Advertisers or Lawyers would benefit from our ability to align people, content, products or purpose, especially our combined use of Twitter, Posterous and other Social Media platforms combined with our accelerated group content facilitation.

Cheers,

Nick Trendov

@eDiscovery_ nick@scenario2.com @SpeedSynch @ResonantView

Exploit Predictive Analytics or Scenario Analysis #IN E-Discovery Projects

Scenario Analysis and Predictive Analytics offer a low risk, high value means to help eDiscovery project teams deliver less expensive high value results faster compared to usual eDiscovery methods.

Whether your eDiscovery teams employ Predictive Analytics or not, Scenario Analysis will help prioritize the sequence of eDiscovery processes and focus limited resources. Indeed if done properly faster, richer E-Discovery results may allow counsel to shape the legal action or negotiate from a position of knowledge before the eDiscovery teams commence their project.

Scenario Analysis for eDiscovery

Scenario analysis is very straight forward and may be done very quickly in most eDiscovery projects if practitioners are guided by the core concepts of scenarios.

1. A scenario is a cluster of stories or content related to the legal action that requires E-Discovery.
2. Case files may be created before an action is resolved or even before eDiscovery commences.
3. Counsel can generally describe two or three high probability outcomes as an action commences.

Go to our @eDiscovery_ Value Brief for a view of combining Predictive Analytics and Scenario Analysis.

Join us to see how to it is possible to use Scenario Analysis and ‘proxy content’ to accelerate your E-Discovery results.

Cheers,

Nick Trendov @eDiscovery_ nick@scenario2.com @SpeedSynch @ResonantView

Exposed E-Discovery Counsel Struggle #IN Great Data Waves

eDiscovery Counsel may be armed with little more than...

Exposed Counsel?

It seems that eDiscovery currently depends on counsel’s ability to run into a great 100 meter high wave of data, pull out a few liters of water and present it to a judge or jury with the assistance of ‘modern’ E-Discovery tools that provide cover equivalent to a Speedo bathing suit and not much else.

Counsel Struggles in Great Data Waves

eDiscovery Counsel struggles with Great Data Waves

Massive amounts of electronic data must be harvested, processed and analyzed, sometimes in databases that span countries or continents–a costly and time consuming process.Applying our datamining experience illustrates a better, cooler and faster approach to eDiscovery by using tools that help the content declare whether it is important in your eDiscovery work by employing the concept of Resonance and SpeedSynch Resonance Maps.

Overview of Discovery
Under the law of the United States, civil discovery is wide-ranging and can involve any material which is “reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence.” This is a much broader standard than relevance, because it contemplates the exploration of evidence which might be relevant, rather than evidence which is actually relevant.

‘Might be Relevent’
The notion of extending eDiscovery to data or content that ‘might be relevent’ is interesting and tends to increase size scope and time in eDiscovery projects as there is no end in sight with ‘might’.

Relevent Scenarios
When an action is launched by a plaintiff the experience of the defending counsel or previous cases usually offer a range of scenarios as a potential outcome of the action.

Working backwards from the outcome scenarios to access the data that would enable their manifestation would reduce eDiscovery time, cost and stress by up to 80%. Plaintiff’s, defendants, counsel and the assets they apply to eDiscovery are focused. 

The Great eDiscovery Data Wave
When you start your E-Discovery project do you feel like your are looking up at a great wave of data about to sweep you away?

Resonance Matters

SpeedSynch Resonance Maps facilitate the employment of a Scenario based E-Discovery approach and SpeedSynch Resonance Maps allow content or data that matches scenarios to float up to the attention of eDiscovery project teams.

Join us to explore the use of Scenario based eDiscovery and the use of SpeedSynch Resonance Maps–help cover your Counsel so that they can do their job better!

Cheers,
Nick @SpeedSynch @ResonantView  nick@scenario2.com



Resonance Rules Predictive Analytics in Great Web and Social Media Marketing

Predictive analytics offers the promise of predicting the future to business executives that direct people and resources to deliver products to markets globally across Web and Social Media channels though in our experience the future is difficult to predict until it happens.

Many simple and proven tools are available to help businesses predict and prepare for what may happen in the future like scenario analysis where clusters of stories are combined to represent possible future states from different perspectives of the business, its customers or other relationships that span extended business value chains.

Predictive Analytics and Global Supply Chain Risk 

In the course of adapting to global competitive pressure business has adopted global supply chains as means to survive and thrive.  The idea behind extended supply or value chains was that all non-core, high risk or high cost processes would be sourced externally to ensure profitably in turbulent markets.

Risk reduction and the quest for higher profits drove global supply chain and outsourcing trends.

The markets or rather customers seem to have their own ideas and now have access to almost an unlimited array of products globally.  Businesses have started to see that customer demand may change faster than it takes to deliver a product shipped internationally or even faster than a heavily managed software project.

Aligning Customer and Product Resonance in Extended Global Value Chains

 

Predicting the Future like Shell Oil    

SpeedSynch scenarios are used to align products or content to customers via a scenario or a cluster of stories that represent a possible future.

 Scenarios were brought into the business limelight by Pierre Wack lifted the creation of Scenarios to a high commercial art and honed his skill at SHELL OIL and SHELL has fantastic resources describing their scenarios and how they are created.

Success, Risk and Resonance 

Success in business is most often confused with precision, formulas and plans though it appears that after you plan life, life just happens. 

When a business plan goes in one direction and their customers go in another we say that the business value didn’t ‘resonate’ with the needs of their customers or simply the business was not successful in serving their market. 

Branding and advertising helps increase the resonance of our content and products with customers and reduce the business exposure to market risk. Business executives are also focused on finding ways to ‘predict’ the future to help them focus on opportunities and direct resources in search of profit.

Resonance Rules Prediction Marketing

Internet marketing changed very little since marketers discovered how to successfully market on the internet, first with Yahoo about 10 years ago and afterwards with Google ads and Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

New Media, TransMedia and Cross Media Value

The intersection of Old Media and Web2.0 has created a New Media, that’s for sure, but what else is happening? 

There is a growing interest in TransMedia or Cross Media,  the ability to engage people by taking a story and delivering it in different places, spaces and times appears to be a faster, simpler and more flexible future for creative marketers and their customers who want to break out of the crowd. 

TransMedia helps people create their own engaging story and Resonance is about understanding the relationships that create market value. 

Current TransMedia Perspectives

Sylvester Stallone shows TransMedia types what to do as he subtly elbows out Leonardo DiCaprio and Angela Jolie out of the way by driving his movie Expendables past Inception and Salt.

The SpeedSynch Resonance Map below shows the Resonance Map created by Sylvester Stallone.

SpeedSynch Resonance Map of Sylvester Stallone Crushing Google

0. Blackberry Twitter app shows Stallone top of Twitter trends worldwide 2010.07.24

1. Check Google volume on Twitter

2. Go to Twitter to find waves of ‘buzz’ tweets — looks like Brazilians tweeting millions

3. Go to Movie site to see when Slyvester Stallone movie is being released — August

4. Find Stallone Expendables movie press releases

5. Use SpeedSynch to create Keyword Theme maps for SEO competitive analysis

6. Review SpeedSynch SEO competitive analysis maps and keyword theme weights

7. Deep dive SpeedSynch Maps show detailed SEO competitive analysis

8. Compare DiCaprio’s INCEPTION with Stallone’s EXPENDABLES Resonance Maps 

Resonance Marketing Rules

In watching Stallone go to work on his competitors in a TransMedia or Cross Media format where the marketing story is spread across multiple media channels globally it is easy to miss the real value behind the success—customer Resonance.

People who go to movies, just like any potential customer have an affinity for a brand and a product, and Stallone’s marketing push with Twitter focused attention to Expendables and away from Inception.

Resonance, Marketing and Product Sales

Applying Resonance Marketing to product sales is a simple process.

1. Craft marketing stories to appeal to multiple customer perspectives or Persona in multiple languages, cultures and markets.

2. Focus on relationships between People, Process (work) and Content.

3. Facilitate and accelerate learning to boost engagement and sales.

 

 

Note: A Persona mask represents customer perspectives or behaviours and may be worn or removed as needed.  We build Persona masks by mapping Customer ‘Resonance’ by understanding their perspectives from the content they prefer, post or other information provided.

Persona masks illuminate stories, processes and probabilities so that we can serve anyone behind a Persona masks regardless of the market segment to which they have been assigned.

SpeedsSynch Resonance Maps help predict future Persona behaviours important for Prediction Marketing.

Resonance Predicts Customer Behaviour Changes 

Traditional marketing models have a difficult time adapting to constantly chaning customer behaviours.

Understanding and aligning the Resonance of Products, Content and Processes allows the business to see when customer needs or behaviours change according to their Resonance.

Products, Risk and Prediction

The art of prediction, highly valued by marketers, accountants and bookmakers starts by understanding what has happened in the past in order to determine what may happen again in the future. 

Typically market researchers take past behaviours and adjust for anticipated changes in the future and create an estimate or guess of what might happen where they create a story whether it is based on a ‘feeling’ or supported by hundreds of spreadsheets as what happens tomorrow is best seen a few days afterwards.

Obvious risks of what may happen in the future are arbitraged as close to zero by using different techniques such as buying insurance or using a portfolio investment approach.

Prediction, Forecasts, Sales and Profit

We show our clients how to apply scenarios and Resonance to quickly identify change, opportunities and reduce risk in their product innovation, manufacturing and sales cycles.

 We craft Persona Masks to predict future customers behaviours or how customers will Resonat.

A Persona mask is ‘crafted’ by linking stories and numbers to customer perspectives to infer possible future behaviours and since we can never know exactly how behaviours will occur in the future we use Scenarios to determine a range of behaviours and get a sense of the potential range of  customer behaviours that may occur in the future.  If this seems a little strange consider the profession of Finance and why accountants forecast.  A financial forecast directs business activity and sets measures of success. 

Stories are behind the numbers carefully constructed by accountants in plans of one, two or more years.  Accountants convert stories to numbers and place them in a structure called a chart of accounts and then manipulate numbers for the rest of the year in a way that separates them from the stories that were at their core.  Indeed accountants ‘map’ out the future of the business with numbers rather than stories.

Our practice is to blend stories, numbers, maps and storyboards to avoid the common trap that marketers and accounts fall into as they manipulate numbers and stories independently of each other.  This ‘split’ causes stories and numbers that started at the same place to get out of sync with each other.  Our Resonance maps align Products to Customers by employing content.

Stories and numbers must Resonate with customers or the business gets out of harmony across its value chain which typically results in something breaking, relationships or profits.

Mining Hidden Value with Resonance Analytics in Global Value Chains

ROI Re-Capture is another benefit of using Resonance to understand where to find the expertise, stories or content value useful for internal projects or external marketing campaigns.  No need to re-invent the wheel, just find the value or content hidden along your global value chain according to what is needed for success.

Links between numbers and stories may be found at http://personati.wordpress.com or SpeedSynch.com

Reversals in Outsourcing and Global Value Chains

Currently we see the manufacturing and service support of key products and processes moving closer to customers to minimize the risk of extended supply chanins that include customers behaviours changing faster than products or projects can be delivered and risk associated with privacy or legal E-Discovery issues.

Contact us for more information about Predictive Analytics, Resonance and the tools needed to deliver high value to Customers that change quickly.

Cheers,

Nick @SpeedSynch nick@scenario2.com

Persona Masks base on SpeedSynch Resonance Maps

 

Starting E-Discovery #IN Data increases Cost or Time up to 400%

In my experience over the past 10 years starting data analysis projects from the data increases the time of the project by at least 400% and in the case of larger data warehouse projects the time approaches infinity as they are only rarely completed successfully regardless of extensions to budget or time.

E-Discovery project approaches mirror data warehouse projects eerily;

• Projects are driven by an IT persepctive
• A focus on capturing ALL data before determining what is useful
• Forcing data into databases or data warehouses before permitting analysis
• A disproportionate amount of project resources are consumed before analysis occurs
• Lawyers and participants in the action that motivated the E-Discovery project are not happy with their ROI

Ground Hog Day

In the movie Ground Hog day Bill Murray is forced to relive the same day again and again until he perceives that his behaviour has trapped him in the loop.  Once he acheives this realization he is able to change the result of the day and move on. 

Oddly enough the EDRM, while it is a good guideline for those without a concept of E-Discovery, replicates the conditioning that was delivered to data warehouse and business intelligence clients.  The same clients that now choose common tools, accelerated deployments and often by-pass data warehouses by taking valid transactional data from transactional sources and processing it overnight on servers that may be as small as a high powered laptop computer.

EDRM or Electronic Discovery Reference Model

We have complemented the image of the EDRM below to indicate in red potential opportunities to reduce costs or E-Discovery project time buy up to 80% by using existing client tools and common technologies applied in a focused way.

The red star with the “0” indicates where the E-Discovery process might begin to yield better, faster and cheaper results, at the end.

Understanding the range of possible outcomes and associated behaviours, content and people associated to those results allows us to focus and prioritize where E-Discovery resources might be directed first and stopping when the results are good enough.

For those situations where the risk of ‘good enough’ is just too high, starting from the end is still better and complements the usual method of capturing and analyzing everything as it allows negototiations related to the scope of the action to occur and possible mediation while the processes proceeds.

E-Discovery Factories

Some law firms have ‘locked-in’ E-Discovery costs by contracting or outsourcing all of their projects fixing their costs while avoiding the potential cost savings possible by using common tools and approaching the E-Discovery process differenly.

Contact us for more detail on a different way to deliver E-Discovery results to your clients by working with your vendors to use simple and common tools.  Don’t forget to ask us about how SpeedSynch Resonance Maps speed up E-Discovery.

Cheers,

Nick Trendov @SpeedSynch nick@scenario2.com

 

Law Firms carry big Risk #IN Outsourced E-Discovery Supply Chains

Law firms may soon discover the big risks embedded in outsourced E-Discovery supply chains, the ones that promise really cheap E-Discovery, the same risks that clients of IT outsourcers currently suffer from horribly;

•  Project times and risk exposures are increased by an ambitious desire to push higher volumes off-shore.
•  E-Discovery projects that start from ‘atomic’ data  perspectives to create inflexible project specifications that deliver low cost answers to the wrong questions or don’t attain the value promised as client or work requirements or objectives seem to change many times before project completion.
• Global E-Discovery outsourcers’ software ‘lock-in’ processes ill-suited to the work at hand. 
•  Privacy issues linked to documents bound by multiple jurisdictions, contractual or moral charges.

Good News for Smaller E-Discovery Practices

The good news for law firms with smaller E-Discovery practices is that some of the largest law firms have locked in contracts, one recently in excess of $500,000,000.  Long term contracts with global E-Discovery supply chain partners virtually eliminates the benefits of constant innovation with new processes, new software or the ability to exploit positive changes in E-Discovery trends shaped by concepts like Proportionality or Mediation.

E-Discovery focus on Global Economies of Scale

 

Indeed the specific design of E-Discovery ‘factories’ offered by E-Discovery outsourcers include products from database vendors or specialized E-Discovery software to cut costs.  However this ‘factory’ must be feed with high content volumes and associated processes that may actually later add costs to the discovery process but must be executed for the factory to function.

 

Speeding Up E-Discovery

 

We employ proven Semantic technology and Content Resonance innovations to facilitate, enrich or accelerate E-Discovery and uncover hidden value during the discovery process.

 

Contact us about speeding up E-Discovery projects or getting more value from your E-Discovery investments.

 

Cheers,

Nick Trendov @SpeedSynch nick@scenario2.com