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

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