Kate Niederhoffer (5 posts)

“Think of it like a nutrition label”

I keep hearing this come up… with respect to LEED certification on buildings, Wal-Mart’s sustainability index, and several other newsworthy scoring systems of late.

Is a nutrition label the ultimate scorecard?

What’s interesting about nutrition labels is that they present several numbers– everything isn’t added up into a single grade or score. In today’s business world, there’s a tendency to add everything up, particularly when it comes to incorporating social media metrics as KPIs.

This is a trap!

The Listening space just got exciting. Again.

Or should I say the Social CRM space?

Coming from what used to be called a social media monitoring research firm, I find changes in this space very interesting– whether they revolve around the quest for the ultimate metric for engagement, the hot new look of a dashboard, or the advancement of semantic technology. Most interesting is when companies join forces, including oldies like BuzzMetrics and NetRatings and Cymfony and TNS and, those hot off the press, Attensity and Biz360 and Scout Labs and Lithium – both of which are being billed as dominant forces in the suddenly expanding Social CRM space.

In Steven Pinker’s eloquent review of Gladwell’s new collection of essays, he coins a new calamity – “the Igon Value Problem,” mocking Gladwell for his misunderstanding/misspelling of the term “eigenvalue” as igon value. The Problem, as defined by Pinker is,
when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to [...]

There are three major opportunities that could help unlock the value of conversations and other social interactions. But first, we have to overcome some very basic human tendencies: the ease of counts, the shine of the surface, and the convenience of snapshots. We need to abandon some traditional standards and stop forcing social data into shapes and sizes that work for other media measurement. Tomorrow is about patterns, depth, and dynamic metrics.

There’s an inherent problem with the word social. Not “social media” or “social business.” Just social. The problem is, it doesn’t incorporate any sense of specificity to it. People are left to think that all things social are massive connectivity festivals. Really, being social is about connecting with sensible, specific others, typically, for specific reasons.