Time to Insight
Are you a Facebook fan of any company? I’m not a “fan boy” but many of my friends are. The company’s motivation is to get closer to customers, hear the “buzz” about the company, see how new products are received, etc. That said, there’s also the potential for dramatically increasing the random noise and hyper active responsiveness that bedevils today’s customers and employees.
The key is separating the real signal from the noise. As two young entrepreneurs told me, it’s finding actionable insight. What a terrific term, but what does that look like? Actionable suggests we’d know what to do next. That’s often a challenge. Sales may be down in an area but should we believe the Twitterati’s opinion of why?
The current starting point for determining influence involves identifying those who influence others from those who do not. Influence on the web is broadly determined by the number of links from one web page to another or the number of followers one has on Twitter. Reasonable but I can quickly see a new industry: social network optimization.
This will follow the path of search engine optimization. I learned from the leader of several automotive web sites that his people devote less than 30% of their time to content and 70% to search engine optimization. Outguessing Google tops my desire to see secret photos of the new Ferrari.
Long ago television and movie studios sold their soul’s to the rating services such that projects are green lit quickly when they’re attached to an existing brand or offer strong merchandising potential. At the same time, we grant hero status to the iPhone in large part because Apple demonstrated how much insight was missing from Nokia and Blackberry products.
The explosive growth of social networks presents a huge opportunity for good. Sustainable advantage will go to those that find the kernels of actionable insight first.
Time-to-Insight
