This post is about looking in one’s mirror and dealing with what is seen. This post’s origin is being told that the reason a company will not use NextStage’s tools is because the tools are “…too accurate.”

First — and I suppose it truly is a first — note that one of the owners of a company is sharing a reason a prospect won’t use that company’s product.

Second, I’ve actually glommed comments from a few folks into this post.

Third, because it’s too accurate???

I did thank the company for their interest, explained that we could always do business in the future, so on and so forth.

Then I hung up the phone and went back to wondering “…because it’s too accurate“?

Let me clarify this a bit. I’m honored by their decision, specifically the reasons behind it. This company’s principals were declining because they were, indeed, principled, and in a way NextStage can completely understand; before they resold our tools they would use the tools on their own material.

But there was some fear in their voice when they said, “Your technology is excellent. Nobody questions its accuracy anymore. You’ve published enough, others have published enough, it shows up in scientific material, Chris Berry even told everybody at his eMetrics Toronto presentation that they should go with NextStage if they want scientifically provable and actionable results, so nobody questions whether or not NextStage tools are accurate anymore.”

(thank goodness, that! And thank you, Chris, for that)

And then the kicker came, “We’re afraid to find out we’re full of BlueSky…” (they used another term) “…or something worse, like our designs really do suck and we always knew they did but could never admit it to ourselves. If we use your tools then we’ll have no choice but to face the facts.”¹

Accuracy

We are sticklers for accuracy here at NextStage. It comes from the research background. It also appears in how we market (we’ve historically relied on word-of-mouth completely). We prefer to quote others who think NextStage is a hot-patootie than to say “NextStage is a hot-patootie” because we have a self-interest and therefore, from a research perspective, are violate on the subject (our opinions don’t matter). Someone else, someone with no interest in NextStage other than their own belief and experience?

Yippee, Great, Loving It and Go For It!²

As for tool accuracy? A market researcher who uses NextStage’s Sentiment Analysis Tool regularly to determine which companies are worth watching said, “Most people will use a tool that’s 80% accurate because there’s still 20% wiggle-room. Wiggle room means it can still be the tool’s fault if something goes wrong. But 98% or 99% accuracy? There’s no where to go with that and so far the tools haven’t been wrong, so now my feet are in the fire if I make a wrong decision. There’s not a lot of people willing to do that.”

Shades of accountability!

No One Can Look Into the Face of God and Live

The above line goes back well into antiquity and is (in various forms) found in oral and written traditions worldwide. The real idea is “No one can look into one’s self and live” and stated that way is at the heart of every shamanic culture and practice, every psychologic intervention and healing, everywhere in the world since such things began. The catholization of Europe moved the concept from looking into one’s own reflection to looking into the face of God, and the whole concept of self-exploration (quite accepted in the East) became gilded as “narcissism” in the West. ³

(Relatively) Recently the concept took the form of scrying mirrors. Scrying deals with divination and scrying mirrors with self-divination. Historically such devices were terrifying (The Portrait of Dorian Gray, wherein the protagonist stays as he wishes to be until he gazes upon his reflection and becomes what he truly is, is a literary example of scrying mirrors) because they deal with the (very real) belief that there is nothing more frightening and debilitating to one’s psyche than to be honest with one’s self. That “Knowledge of Good and Evil” thing? Study the original languages, study what different cultures meant by “The Book of Knowledge” and it always comes down to “knowledge of one’s self”.⁴

We at NextStage regularly go on retreats to perform such scrying. It’s not always easy…heck, it’s rarely easy. And I’m not talking as in “Web Analytics is Hard”, I’m talking as in psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually dealing with the real who of who you are.⁵

Are there aspects about yourself you don’t like and wish you could change? Welcome to the first stop in your tour de vous. Find out why those aspects “can’t be changed”. What can you do to change them in such a way that the change is 1) obvious to you then 2) obvious to others?

And you do this until you’re raw. I mean raw like you can’t have people around you because you’re so ashamed of the who that you’ve been and at the same time you desperately want those around you to tell you they love you all the more for what you’ve just put yourself through, that they’ll help you because you made the start, …

Now realize you’re doing this on your own, there is nobody around you to tell you they love you and will be there for you and will help you…

So that means you’ll have to tell yourself you love yourself, that you’ll be there for you, that you’ll help you, and remember that you’ve just emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, intellectually crippled yourself by going into that part of yourself you didn’t like in the first place and discovered it was there for an extremely, righteously, honest-to-god good reason that might not be such a good reason anymore, so maybe you should lop that part off, like cutting off a hand because it’s infected and the infection is spreading.

So that part of you dies. You’re raw because you just killed a part of yourself.

But you did it and in doing it, in recognizing there were things that only you could change, you gave birth to a new self, a new you and you’ve become your own phoenix rising from your own flames (people who’ve read Reading Virtual Minds Volume I, this is the Core work we were talking about).

And a NextStageologist requirement is putting yourself through such scryings regularly because it’s the only way we’ve found we can do what we do and be honest about it. Such scryings are what allow us to know how people are thinking without judging their thoughts.

Because the moment we recognize that we’re judging their thoughts we have to ask, “What is there about this information that’s causing me to become judgmental?” and sha-bang sha-boomie we pull ourselves out of work and put ourselves through another bout of scrying, another round of peeling layers off our onions and healing.⁶

So “Accuracy”…

Being told that a company doesn’t want to use our technology because they’re not ready to look into the mirror is completely understandable to us.

Very much so.

In fact, before we publicly released the NextStage Sentiment Analysis tool, we had a long conversation about accuracy, as in “Joseph, you’ve put a lot of information out there. At some point, someone’s going to analyze your stuff. You ready for that?”

The suggestion was even made that we teach ET to recognize my writing regardless of how it was presented and always report “My goodness, this is great stuff!”

And yes, I labored. I wrestled with my own angels for a while.

And in the end, ET (”Evolution Technology” for newcomers to NextStage’s work) won. Either I accept the tools as accurate or I have no right to expect others to do so. I can’t proclaim “NextStage’s tools are correct for everyone else but me” because that’s simply not how it works. ET is designed to report unbiasedly, to understand human emotion while not being influenced by any emotions of its own (so far. A future release will respond emotionally when asked), so truth is truth is truth and there are no shades of gray in ET’s world.

Gosh, how simple. No wonder it frightens people.

A First Reader Who’s On Her Way to Being the First “Outside the House” Certified NextStageologist suggested I include this Addendum

So the reason that some people stay with NextStage for years and others quickly fold and go away is that scrying part. You may not even want to lift that mirror and being around us, those Principles and all, tends to lift it for you. This scrying isn’t something we do intentionally. It’s probably an aspect of “The Joseph Effect” (see Understanding and Using NextStage’s Level 1 Sentiment Analysis Tool) and just seems to happen.⁷

I guess this goes in as another undocumented use of ET — scrying.

We have 7+ tools out there now and more on the way. The principals of the company that spawned this post are realizing they have a reflection and congratulations to them.

To whomever else may be reading, “Mirror, anyone?”

---

1 – I feel another tool coming on…The NextStage Suckometer!

Actually, that wouldn’t be a stretch…According to FireClick for the week I’m writing this (12 Jul 10), global conversions are 1.8% and cart abandonment is 72%. Obviously the sites generating those numbers suck.

People look at NextStage’s KnowledgeShop site and politely let us know it “sucks”. They don’t use that word and it’s in there anyway. And our numbers are…pretty good. I mean, we doubled sales last month. Mostly on bulk purchases, too, not 1-offs, and that includes book sales.

So I’m comfortable with the fact that our site “sucks” and recognize it must suck in a completely different way than other sites suck. I mean, it has to be on a whole different suck system because our numbers are lots better than those listed by FireClick.

Maybe readers should come to us to learn how to make their sites suck, too?

back

2 – Even when we do “advertise” it’s very dry, statistical, and demonstrably fact oriented in nature, no wild promises, no hype. Exactly what we tell our clients not to do.

But we are NextStage. We follow a different path…

back

3 – A typical example of the difference between cultures was demonstrated at a meeting many years back and completely unrelated to online analytics (it didn’t exist at the time).

I mentioned that I would no longer be attending the meetings because I was learning more on my own than from the group. One group member challenged me on this, “You think you can sit by yourself and learn more than you can learn here?”

I said, “Buddha sat in front of a wall for days and finally arose, saying ‘Now I’m enlightened’.”

My challenger harrumphed, “So now you think you’re Buddha.”

“No,” I answered. “The wall.”

back

4 – In fact, way back in 2004, before there were wikis and blogs and MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, FourSquare and such, we created a site, MirrorOfYourSoul.com (now it points to the Pictou County Flyers site because, between kiting and Nova Scotia, that truly does mirror our souls here at NextStage). That site’s layout was a scrying mirror that allowed users (we tested it pretty extensively with college students) to gather, chat with each other, and offer comments on material that revealed things about themselves.

It was quite the hit and typical to NextStage, having proven the concept, we put it on our shelf and moved on. We really need someone on the “taking the proven concept to market” part, should anybody out there be reading…

back

5 – I’ve made attempts to get some of the big names in the online analytics industry to look at themselves analytically. Now that, I readily admit, is hard!

back

6 – Now perhaps you’ll understand why we offer “recognition of attendance” rather than “certifications” in our trainings.

back

7 – I admit to enjoying learning about The Joseph Effect although I’d rather it be referenced as The NextStage Effect as it’s not about me, it’s about a way of “doing”, of “being”. Example: Susan and I received the following in an email when we returned from a recent research retreat, “I wanted to get back to both you and Susan to say I really enjoyed meeting you both and hope that we can further our friendship. You were kind and thoughtful. Stimulating and challenging. What friends should be. You sent me back to California thinking about how does one live an ethical life without making it a pedantic one:)”

One thing we’ve learned through our studies is in the title of NextStage’s Principles page, “When you squeeze an orange you get orange juice.”, meaning “Apply pressure to a system and you learn how that system really works. If that system is a human, put that human under pressure and you learn what that human is really like, how they really think, whether or not they believe what they claim, can do what they claim, etc.

It’s not about making incredible tools for us, although what it is for us — leaving the planet a better place than we found it, helping people live better lives — is probably what allows us to come up with the tools we do.

back

NextStage’s Evolution Technology calls for human help whenever it encounters something new, unique, or out of its normal experience. Reading Virtual Minds Vol. 1: Science and History readers know our technology does this because I’ve documented it in that book.

This time our system alerted me about a specific Confidence value (from the Intermediate Sentiment Analysis Report) that was a little askew compared to other values it had determined, so I sent an email to the user who’d run the report and offered to go over it with them so we both could learn what that Confidence value applied to.

On Friday (2 Jul 10) afternoon, after our coders had left for the July 4th weekend, the user wrote back very graciously (thanks!) that they’d need to learn how not to fabricate in their writing.

What?

Their response threw me. What did “fabrication” have to do with this Confidence value?

Development History

Readers who’ve followed NextStage Sentiment Analysis development and beta users may remember that NSSA’s Confidence report grew out of a request from FindMeFaster CEO Matt Van Wagner for a tool that could determine if a blog author was full of BlueSky (Matt had another term) or not.

It took a long time to come up with something that I was comfortable with as determining blue sky because there are so many different factors to determining intentional BS from unintentional BS from joking BS from … This discomfort showed up with almost daily rewrites of the Confidence descriptive text. The rewriting process was similar to Mark Twain’s “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

What we came up with was a Confidence equation that included various BS factors because I couldn’t figure out how to completely separate the two (we can discuss the Confidence-BS link at a convention or training sometime, if you’d like. It’s pretty interesting). I wasn’t completely satisfied with the formulation we came up with, could accept it for what it was and told everyone who was using the tool about my concerns.

Then in early May 2010, during conversations with some brilliant researchers specifically about how BS is formed in cognition, we came up with a way to separate BS from Confidence and proceeded to completely spin off Matt’s BS Meter into a separate tool that dealt with whether or not some writing was fabrication or not.

Mea Culpa

But I focus on the charts whenever I look at our reports, not at the descriptive text included in the reports. I’ve been seeing these charts and such for better than ten years at this point so I simply look at the charts, know what’s being reported and respond to that.

I don’t look at the text anymore.

And I obviously should. When this user emailed me that they needed to work on fabrication I went “Huh?” and looked at the report again. “What does this have to do with fabrication?” Then I looked again. Then again. Then I read the report.
The descriptive text for the Confidence report was:

Confidence Gauge – The above gauge indicates (on a scale of -100 to 100) the author’s confidence in their own material. Values from -100 to -80 can most likely be considered pure fabrication although this may not be the author’s intent. Also note that someone writing fiction is intentionally fabricating information. Skilled authors and dramatists can write pure fiction and this meter will indicate confidence is high merely because they have high confidence in their work. This chart is most applicable to people with moderate to no creative writing training.

That descriptive content was the best we could come up with prior to spinning off the BS Meter. The funny thing (to us) was that the suggestions (not shown here) were based on Confidence metrics, had nothing to do with BS and had been part of the Confidence report from the start. Those never changed.

But we’d spun off the BS Meter.

And we’d written new, more accurate descriptive text for the Confidence report:

Confidence Gauge – The above gauge indicates (on a scale of -100 to 100) the author’s confidence in their own material. Some examples:

• Values from -100 to -75 can occur when the author believes strongly in their material (is confident) and also believes it will not be well accepted, understood or acted upon by their audience (isn’t confident about its reception).
• Most research and technical writing will score between -20 and 0 because researchers and technical writers tend to have an “I should check this one more time” mindset.
• It is common for natives of the USA to score between -15 and +10 when analyzing casual, “every day” writing.
• Truly confident writers will score between 15 and 35.
• Scores higher than 80 often indicate the author will come off as either sarcastic or vain, based on the author’s acceptance by their audience.

This chart is most applicable to people with moderate to no creative writing training.

And we (I) completely forgot to put it in.

Let this be proof that I’m not as clever as (it seems) many people think.

Making Amends

It’s amusing that this mistake was discovered after we reported our best sales month ever.

But Principles are Principles and when squeezed, one discovers the flavor of the juice.

So by the time this post sees the light of day, everyone who purchased NextStage Sentiment Analysis use since 12 June 2010 (when the BlueSky Meter was released) will have received email notification that their subscription has been renewed. Please contact NextStage if your subscription isn’t renewed (and have your purchase data handy).

Hey, it’s not exactly an oil spill in the Gulf and we do what we can to make things right.

Okay, so that’s not quite the way Rod Stewart sang it.

This post is going to be about things being not quite but close to and in a way will follow the tone of The High Cost of Cancelling WorkOutWorld Membership. It’s going to be about the long loong loooooong road to NextStage’s new interface, one that will be going across all our sites in the coming months.

And it begins better than a year ago. I think two years ago at this point… (just looked it up. Yep, two years ago at this point…)

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Long ago I was asked what the new NextStage interface should look like based on the new audiences we were attracting. I came up with a crisp, clean, neat and highly actionable design. There were only three things you could do on that page I designed; Go to the NextStage Analytics site, enter the NextStage Evolution site or become a NextStage Evolution member (and hence gain access to our research and core Evolution Technology (”ET”) itself).¹

I drew out the design by hand with lots of explanation of color schemes, fonts, image sizes, logo, …

My notes and drawings became the image on the right. People loved it when I showed it to them. One marketing maven thought devoting so much screen real estate to transferring people to the NextStage Analytics site (the big blue box on the right of the image) was wasteful. My response was a question, “Do you design such that the site’s goals and the visitor’s goal synch?”²

Umm…cough…nervous smile and furrowed brow… “Yes, of course I do.”

uh Huh.

The design I came up with recognized NextStage’s two audiences and that those two audiences would rarely sit at the same table together. One audience is marketing folks. Few of those folks really want what NextStage Evolution offers (pure and applied research, access to our researchers, research papers, …) , therefore quickly, cleanly and easily get them over to the site of a company that does offer what they want, NextStage Analytics. That site (also designed by me) is shown on the right. That big center box would hold a video or flash that was activated by the three large buttons on the left, from top to bottom “Learn About”, “What We Do” and “Who We Are”, the three functions we had learned were upmost on the minds of our shifting audience.

NextStage Analytics has a much more markety³ feel to it. The two sites share color schemes and such due to branding, they differ where they have to due to the different audiences they’d serve.

Visually distinctive and highly actionable designs with extremely good visual cues regarding what to do, what goals are achievable and how to achieve them, colors specifically chosen to echo people’s concerns about what we do and guide them past their concerns and into acceptance, all that NextStagey kind of stuff…

These two images — just the images. I drew out and explained the designs, color schemes, action paths, …, remember? — together cost about US$78,000.

People thought NextStage’s consulting prices were high?

I was told not to worry about the cost.

Oh-kay.

I’m skeptical by nature. People are surprised by that. You may have noticed in my blog posts, presentations and such that I tend towards caution, tend not to make a move without lots of evidence, rely on data-driven information, actively seek the counsel of others, …

One of the ways this manifests is that I don’t spend money unless I’m absolutely convinced there will be real, recognizable benefit to doing so. I’m frugal. And for the going on ten-plus years I’ve been doing this, no one ever, anywhere at any time has been able to prove⁴ to me that money spent redesigning a site consistently, directly, unequivocally, unquestionably and with a better than 83%⁵ certainty turned into increased revenue from that site.

Ever.

And I’ve asked people. Lots of people. Ten and better years of people.⁶

And nobody ever gave me an answer. Some…in fact, the majority by close to 100%… said that I shouldn’t ask that kind of question. It had nothing to do with what site (re)design was about.

Say what? What do you mean I can’t equate the cost of a site redesign to revenue from that redesign moving forward? No wonder marketers and analysts don’t get along. And people wonder what planet I’m from?

This whole exercise stated with a request to help new visitors migrate to a more comfortable interface. Migrating people between interfaces is something NextStage is very familiar with (it’s covered in Reading Virtual Minds Volume 2: Theory and Online Applications. I really need to finish that book. In the meantime, go read Site ReDesign to Maximize Visitor Acceptance and Branding). Migrating people between interfaces allows past audiences to combine with new audiences in ways that keep both audiences happy and converting.⁷

And these images work how? Explain to me how these jpgs become a website again, I seemed to have missed that detail the first time

Once past sticker shock I wanted to know “How do you create page templates from these images?”

Well…you don’t. There were no templates. It was all handled by an advanced CMS.

Fair enough. “The CMS system must break up the image somehow, right? I mean, you don’t drop an image of the completed page on the browser each time someone clicks on a different page, do you?”

That’s all handled by the CMS.

“Fine. How?”

I don’t know.

“Where are the docs for the CMS?”

There were no docs for the CMS. It was a custom CMS. You’ll have to trust us.

“Okay, where does the CMS go that’s going to cms our site?”

On your server.

Where it went. And went untouched. By them. For…I’m not sure, I’d have to ask Charles⁸, but I think it was between 3-6 months.

Oh, they did a few things on it at first — installation alone took over a month because they forgot to make sure all the software they needed was installed before loading the CMS — and then fewer…and fewer…and then…

And during none of this time did we see those beautiful designs turned into operational reality. I did see a “dev” site once with menus that opened when you clicked on the buttons, but no menu item led anywhere and the dev site never got past that homepage.

Which was loaded as a whole image, I think.

I finally asked Charles to look through the CMS data and see if there were any templates, any pages, any anything we could use.

He didn’t find any templates or pages, no…

But he did find contact and business data for all the other customers this group had worked with in the past.

Out went “You’ll have to trust us.” Real quick.

I asked the design firm contact why nothing had been done. “You hurt [the designer's] feelings.” Not to mention that said designer thought I was a #%&!!MCU**^@! because I kept on asking for results along with the bills.

But wait a second…I hurt the designer’s feelings? How so?

“You didn’t take his suggestions.”

I said to the contact, “But even you admitted you preferred my design to his, that my design moved you at a gut level and in a positive direction. You admitted his didn’t do either, that it was ’sexy’ but ineffective and non-motivational.” Not to mention that in a standard A/B test⁹ people stayed on my design and replayed it — the video or flash centerpiece — an average of three times to the ’sexy’ design’s once and usually moving on before it completed a single run.

I asked, “And how come nobody’s concerned about my feelings? I don’t suppose he could take this as a learning opportunity, could he? God knows I am.”

I was once again told I “shouldn’t ask that kind of question.”¹⁰

Next I asked the design group contact to show me how the CMS worked because “This makes it so much easier to manage sites and change features.”

Okay. Fair enough. And I will admit that the new design image did come up on the screen. But only inside the CMS, not in a web browser. I pointed to a button in the image, moved my finger to another part of the screen and said, “Move that over to here.”

That’s not what the CMS is designed to do.

Uh…yeah. Perhaps my emPHAsis was on the wrong sylLAble. Perhaps it wasn’t CONTENTmanagement but contentMANAGEMENT. “Okay. Do something. Anything. Show me how this tool does something that I can recognize as ’something got done’.”

Five minutes later I was still waiting.

An incredibly complicated tool that…did…nothing…

But dang it sure did cost a lot!¹¹

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

“Charles, that business data you found. Is it still in there?” It was.

“Could you just pull the names for me? Nothing else, nothing more. Just the contact names.” He did.¹² I recognized some of the names. Knew them on a friendly level. I called them and asked, “What can you tell me about such-and-such-and-so-and-so CMS?”

The best (meaning, least painful sounding) response was “We had it {note “had it”} for two years and could never get it to work right.” About middle was “We had it {again with the “had it”}on our servers but every time we wanted to change our site we had to go to them because there were no docs and there was no training.”

Great way to insure job security, that. No docs, no training, and by selling a tool that’s so complex to use only the people who built it know how to use it.¹³

I was quickly realizing there was an unsatisfactory solution in the making. Time to rethink and reassess. I’ve written elsewhere that one of my math mentors once told me, “For god’s sake, if you’re going to make a mistake make it at the beginning. It’ll be easier to find and you’ll have less invested in getting to the result.”

Good advice, that. We were still close enough to the beginning…I mean, there was no operational site and only some jpgs to play with…so I called John, someone I’ve known for years and who designs toys, statues, cars, comics, bookcovers (he did Reading Virtual Minds V1 and he’ll be doing the rest if I ever get them written), just about everything. “John, I need something to bridge the NextStage site design while adding certain other elements towards a new design. Interested?”

Migration Behaviors – Designing for them and Understanding them

First, you don’t have to be a bird, a caribou, a bison or some other animal to take part in migration. Humans were migrating a long, long time ago (see Birth Control’s Long History for an example) and you’ll probably be shocked to learn that the parts of our brains used to move from one geography to another are the same parts of our brains used to move from one interface to another.

Think of it this way; We have all that neural horsepower just waiting for something to do but most of us don’t perform seasonal migrations anymore (people who travel from a summer home to a winter home and back aren’t performing migrations in the ethological or behavioral sense). However, we do regularly migrate cognitive landscapes.

Cognitive landscapes? You probably call them interfaces. And not just software interfaces, but any commonly used human-nonhuman interaction point, place, method or system is an “interface”.

For example, I’m a’ guessing that one of the most obvious human-nonhuman interaction points is hardly given any thought by the vast majority of people reading this post although it was a major stepping stone in each reader’s personal histories and without it, your ability to socialize would be severely handicapped. That interaction point is the toilet.

Bet you never thought of the toilet as an interface, let alone a cognitive landscape. But enter a public or private bathroom and not have the interface you’re use to and whompus! don’t you do some thinking? Some looking around for what you know should be there? Don’t you experience some confusion?

Well, thinking, visual searching and confusion are all aspects of cognition. When you think about yourself doing something in some place you’re familiar with then find yourself needing to do that same something in a place you’re unfamiliar with, you create a image of that familiar place in your mind, match what you know to what you don’t know and mentally “walk” through the familiar while looking around the unfamiliar to figure out where what you need is located.

Have you ever misplaced something and thought back in time to when you last knew you had it or saw it, then mentally moved forward in time to figure out where you last had it?

Congratulations, you were navigating a cognitive landscape.

Have you ever sat down to use an upgrade or completely new version of some once familiar software and had to figure out how to perform a once familiar task, perhaps saying to yourself something like “Hmm…that use to be on this menu. I wonder where they put it now?”¹⁴

Congratulations, you were navigating a cognitive landscape.

These cognitive landscapes are everywhere and people involved in usability, product and information design and the like would do well to study them. Have you had to drive an unfamiliar car?

You can do the “major” car function pretty easily — you can drive it to get where you’re going. But what about the lights? Anybody remember when highbeams moved from the floor switch to the steering column? Anybody remember when the horn went from the center of the steering wheel to the steering wheel ring itself (that one didn’t last)? And what about the radio? Or the mirrors?

Cognitive landscapes again and a tribute to the evolution of automotive design. You want to sell cars to lots of people? Make the “major” car functions as standard as possible. You want to sell your cars to lots of people? Make the “minor” car functions just different enough that they’re both distinctive and more easily performed than in your competitors’ models.¹⁵

Anyway, moving people from one interface to another is an exercise in helping them migrate from one cognitive landscape to another.

A simple problem that’s already been solved many times in many places.

Here are the migration goals¹⁶ as they apply online:

1. Uniformity across web presences…
2. While demonstrating individuality among interfaces…
3. That doesn’t alienate the known audience…
4. While appealing to the new audience…
5. And retains a simple, elegant functionality.

By the numbers…

1. Uniformity across web presences

We wanted a “standard” interface for branding purposes. What is the brand we want recognized across all interfaces?

NextStage Evolution (Duh!).

Simple enough. Most people recognize the little figure with the concentric circles around its head as the NextStage logo. It’s on our cards, our current website, in our presentations and letterhead. In truth, we’ll probably never get rid of it because we’ve grown quite fond of our little homunculus. But our audience is changing and growing, so change and grow must our logo as well. Especially now that we’re releasing our desktop tools as web-based tools. But let our regular audience know it’s still us while letting our more recent audience know we’re growing and changing with them.

Also, our color has traditionally been blue. The concept of “blue” carries with it many, many messages (regardless of culture) that we find favorable, so stick with that, just bring it out more.

So if you’ve seen NextStage’s new storefront (and you should really go check it out. We’re adding items daily right now) or our BlueSky Meter, OnSite, PersonaScope, Sentiment Analysis, and I have no idea how many other tools we’ll have out by the time this post sees the light of day, you’ll quickly recognize that some standardization is at work.

In fact, our new banners are remarkably similar…except in the bright, sunburst yellow, product specific title just left of center on each banner.

And yes, there is a very specific and excellent reason that we used that sunburst yellow color for our product titles. And yes, there’s a specific and excellent reason that our product titles are just left of center in the banner.

It won’t matter which tool people use, they’ll very quickly know that they’re on a NextStage site and the specific tool that site is serving.

It would be great if similarity of banners was all that’s required. We also want to make sure that people who use any one tool will be able to quickly and easily use every other tool. Therefore…

…standardize the menu across all sites.¹⁷ Use a menu on one product site and you can navigate on all product sites.

2. While demonstrating individuality among interfaces…

Did you read what I wrote above about the banners being different and then only in the name of the product or place?

And why yellow? Sunburst yellow? Just left of center (a clue — when the number of our visitors from south of the equator increases a bit we’ll make our sites sensitive to that and reverse the banner layout)? In a blue background? Sky blue background?

Hmm…

Do some optocular-psychophysics and you learn that the sunburst yellow, sky blue color combination is something the visual system has had millions if not billions of years adapting to (the just left or right of center not so much so and still enough). It creates a calling in the very bases of our psyches such that denied sunlight and blue skies for enough time humans become suicidal, homicidal and worst of all, less likely to convert!

Oh, my goodness no!

But give our psyches sunburst yellow in a deep blue background and it’s Convert, Baby, Convert!

3. That doesn’t alienate the known audience…

Did you read above about using colors that had always been our colors? Or keeping our homunculus mascot and logo? Or our wonderful sense of humor and bon vi vance?

It turned out that our logo is so unique and so identifiable that people often equate it with NextStage’s other predominant brand, me. And even those people who don’t know it’s our logo know it doesn’t belong to any other company they’re aware of.

More to the point, when people who know nothing about us are shown the logo and asked to say something about the company behind it, they always answer that the company has something to do with minds, brain science, neurology, medical devices for measuring or analyzing the brain.

“…measuring or analyzing the brain” “…brain science…” “…minds”.¹⁸

Hmm…

As I’ve written in this post before, I’m good with that.

4. While appealing to the new audience…

Did I mention that our traffic volume and conversions have gone up while our bounces have gone down?

5. And retains a simple, elegant functionality.

Four simple menu items for products; Home, Pricing/Order, About, Contact.

Six in the KnowledgeShop and based on what people purchase from us; Home, Books, Papers, Presos, Tools, Trainings.

And so…

Sexy? I’m still not sure what the word means exactly in a design context. I do know that I can’t get more than a few people to a) agree on a definition and that small number decreases rapidly when I ask them to b) determine metrics for it. There is a science that can be thought of as a study of “what is sexy?”, Koinophilia or Koinophology, and yes, we’ve been doing about two years’ worth of research on it (most recently and with many thanks to fellow researcher, Greg Peverill-Conti, who’s supplying us with images to use in the research). Brad Berens presented some of our research to date to RedBull International and they were both interested and intrigued (thanks, Brad!).

What is “sexy”? For that matter, what is “professional”? It’s like the congressional definition of pornography, “Pornography is what I’m pointing at when I say it.” Explain “sexy” and “professional” as some kind of achievable ROI metric, then define action items that you have great surety will achieve that ROI, then demonstrate that ROI has been achieved in such a way that the data actually unequivocally undeniably indicates that what you did caused this result and there’s no two-ways about it, and I’ll believe you.

Until my research indicates something different or better.

People remember extremes, not middleground. Whatever else, NextStage is remembered (and thought of fondly, we hope). NextStage has always designed to be remembered and nobody confuses our brand with anybody else, so we’re good for two.

Designing incredibly well is one of the simplest things to do yet one of the most difficult to achieve because everybody believes they’re an expert while not having repeatable, demonstrable expertise. The end result? Lots of incredibly expensive, difficult to navigate, “sexy” to some while crap to others, debranding and unmemorable websites emerge and are quickly forgotten.

Add to this mix “the more specialized (single purpose) a tool is the more expensive that tool becomes”, add in site design, branding, navigation and conversion and you can go out of business (or close to) before anything is achieved. And if you’re a user who wants a taste for free then know you’re free sample is going to increase the ultimate cost of whatever you’re sampling for free at some point in time and you’ll end up paying for free whether you want to or not.

Addendum

On the day I finished the rough draft of this post I was sent Why Google backed down on home page backgrounds and Remove Google Background Critics Plead by some of our researchers and I was reminded of the person who, commenting on NextStage’s simple interface, said, “Well, it works for Google.”

Yep, sure does. And didn’t they learn something when they went to change it?

Well, pretty much, yes, they did learn something…what’s in Site ReDesign to Maximize Visitor Acceptance and Branding.

Gotta love it!

---

1 – Just so you’ll know, our loyal NextStage Evolution audience would have a link to the old site and be emailed login and passwords to the new site, something described in Site ReDesign to Maximize Visitor Acceptance and Branding.
back

2 – You can read more about this at Claudiu Murariu’s If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be? post).

back

3 – “markety” as in “Designed to appeal, entice, excite and engage people with a marketing mindset.” You’ll be shocked (Shocked!) to learn our Evolution Technology can determine such things and has been doing so since…oh…2003 or so (see Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History, Chapter 4 “Hans Reimar Gets Offered a Job in Sales” for an example of this).

back

4 – I will share an incantation with you, one I learned long ago and have used ruthlessly ever since. It is one of the most powerful magic spells known to humankind. It has stopped the high and the low immediately, confounded the minds of the wise and simple and brought strong men and women to their knees in remorse and shame. That incantation is…

Prove It!

back

5 – I use “83%” because that’s been ET’s average accuracy since 2001. We’ll be doing a major upgrade to our Language Engines sometime this year (2010) and we expect that accuracy to climb a few notches although how much higher is due to [agonizingly long mathematical discussion deleted by Susan. Bet you're glad, ain't'cha?].

back

6 – I actually started asking back in the late 1990s, during the dot com boom. I came to think that the dot com bust was due to people thinking a complete redesign meant more revenue when all they could guarantee a complete redesign meant was increased cost for the new design.

back

7 – Isn’t it nice that we euphemize it to “converting”? I guess I’m the only person on the planet who wants them to buy buy buy.

back

8 – Charles, I guess it’s time to reveal, is NextStage’s CTO. He’s been our little secret for quite a while now and we’ve convinced him to start shining his light. To that end, he’s writing and publishing articles under his own name (see Sample Size and Sampling Error in Social Media for an example).

I’ve known Charles since the early 1990s and in a completely different context than CTOish type things. He was, in fact, one of Evolution Technology’s (ET) earliest adopters and promoters. We’d gotten into the habit of emailing each other regularly and talking on the phone one or two times a week just to chat.

About a year back I was complaining about the fact that a “very good. He’s smart and can do what we need” data designer and programmer had already taken two months, charged US$30k and so far had failed to convert ET’s data system into something robust enough to move from desktop applications to a software as a service model.

I had explained to the “very good, smart” designer/programmer that ET’s data system was an identity-relational model, something that mimicked how the brain-mind recognizes things (as documented in Reading Virtual Minds V1: Science and History). Yes, I used a traditional entity-relational database technology to do it, but please don’t look for transactional processing, it doesn’t happen.

Two months, US$30k, and nothing. This very good, very smart person even wrote our contact that the design didn’t make sense and couldn’t work. Eventually our contact wrote us “…it was much too complicated that I thought to begin with” but only after first denying the situation for a while. Denial tactics don’t cut it with me much. Have you seen our Principles, specifically #6 – Take Responsibility for Your Actions and #15 – It is not easier to get forgiveness than permission?

So one Sunday, while talking to Charles, I mentioned this.

“Mind if I take a look?”

No, please. Be my guest. Knock yourself out.

An hour later Charles called me back. “I have your database working in SQL. Mind checking to see if it’s returning correct values?”

Within ±2db, it was. How did you do it so quickly?

“Your design had been working fine for better than ten years so it obviously did what it was suppose to do, and I know I don’t know how it’s suppose to work because even you admit you created that d?mned identity-relational model specifically for ET, so I just copied your structure into SQL, made only the necessary changes to make it SQL and tested to see if it worked. It did, so that’s that.”

Since then, Charles has learned more about how identity-relational models and improved my original designs greatly.

For much less than US$30k. In much less than two months. His improvements to my original designs are why what originally took ten minutes now takes about ten seconds.

And if you think I’m scary, say something you can’t prove with facts — lots of ‘em — to Charles sometime.

back

9 – Yes, we do perform A/B and such tests although only in a greater “A/B” frame — if A is a traditional A/B test and B is NextStage’s methodology, which produces greater ROI?

Well, NextStage does. See Panalysis’ Rod Jacka Said It for a public example of this.

back

10 – Note to people who wish to interact with us in the future: We’re RESEARCHERS!!! What we do is ask questions. All the time. And we don’t give up until we get answers that make sense along with all the other answers we’ve ever gotten. That’s probably why we’re such tough sells. We ask questions companies don’t want to answer.

Then again, it’s also probably why we’re so effective. Think of it as a corollary to Holmes’ “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth“, “When you have eliminated all that doesn’t work, whatever remains, however improbable, must work.”

back

11 – Have you been following my rants (well, for me they’re rants) about outrageous pricing models? Sentiment Analysis at a Price Everyone Can Afford or Sentiment Analysis Costs How Much?, for example.

This concept that quality can only come at a high price reminds me of purchasing manure spreaders for the farm. Manure spreaders only glisten and shine when they’re on the showroom floor and the salesperson who doesn’t talk about spreading capacity, throw distance, rate and volume either doesn’t know what they’re selling or doesn’t have much respect for who they’re selling to. Manure spreaders can be right pretty when they’re not working or doing anything useful other than standing still doing nothing. They stop glistening and shining after the first use, usually the most junior farmhand is tasked with cleaning it after its used and it won’t work at all without a correctly geared and throttled tractor pulling it.

The big difference between farmers and businesses is that farmers know the manure spreader will get covered with sh?t as soon as it’s used, so buy one based on ability, not on looks.

back

12 – Did I mention that Charles is incredibly good at doing exactly what I ask, no more, no less, and when he does more he always gives me what I asked for first, then let’s me know there’s more if I want it and because he’s so good at what he does I always want the “more”. And you wonder why we’ve kept him secret? Wouldn’t you like to work with someone who responds to your requests that well and that quickly? Hmm?

back

13 – One of our NextStage Sentiment Analysis beta testers commented that the original NSSA interface (shown on the right) was completely functional but she couldn’t show it to anybody. Another person offered that she couldn’t show it to management.

Fortunately, I’m good with that. I wanted to know if they ever had trouble using the tool.

“Nope, it works every time.”

It’s not difficult to use?

“Nope. You login, you enter what you want analyzed, you press [ENTER] and that’s it. A few seconds later you get your report.”

Several beta users commented that it was amazingly fast. They thought it would take a while to finish it’s analysis and were surprised when they didn’t even have time to stand up (that’s that “Charles in ten seconds thing” I mentioned earlier).

Are the reports difficult to understand?

Not at all. You explained one over the phone and it was pretty obvious…almost intuitive (well, I should hope so, really. Intuition is one of the ways the non-conscious communicates with the conscious, and as that is what Evolution Technology is geared to do, voila!).

You still using it?

“Definitely!”

So…easy to use (check!), understandable (check!), actionable (check!), works every time (check!), still using it (Check!!!) …

I’m good with such things. Handing me a gold hammer equates to telling me you’ve never driven a nail (gold, softer than steel, will deform each time you strike the nail). Yes, a gold hammer looks real pretty in your hand but for heaven’s sake don’t use it. You’ll hurt yourself, you’ll ruin the pretty and expensive hammer and you won’t get squat done.

And besides, NSSA Advanced and Voices versions includes spreadsheets of their analysis. If you need a gold hammer, you can make exactly the one you need because we provide all the parts.

Now about not showing the interface to management…during a training I mentioned that the tool would process any material although we preferred text for now. Somebody asked if it could process emails.

“Yeah, sure.”

And they promptly sent through an email from management.

And I explained the output for them without knowing what they had sent through.

And they were laughing their heads off.

And then they told me it was a management email about the new benefits package.

With Confidence about -90%, Trust at 0%, Destructive at 88%, They’re Not Good People at 80%, …

Lots of people are sending through management and other emails, we learned, so we’re coming out with a tool to specifically read emails. I’ll announce it on Twitter, I’m sure.

back

14 – Our constant interviewing of common people continually pulls up interesting tidbits. Regarding redesigns debranding, one individual who was (was!) a loyal FoxNews.com visitor told us “Foxnews.com just redesigned their homepage and lost me for one as a visitor. It’s busy, confusing and takes too much effort to find what I want.”

Way to go, Fox!

back

15 – I once owned a very high end BMW. Everybody was impressed by it. Valets in Boston, Montreal, Hartford, New Haven, NYC and Quebec City always commented on what a great car it was, how good looking it was.

The only problem was that the seats fit neither Susan’s nor my butt. We looked great, people took note of our comings and goings and it was one of the most danged uncomfortable rides we ever had. Not to mention that once or twice the car’s computer forgot we were driving, that I was the owner, had entered the correct code and decided to shut itself down anyway.

While we were on the highway.

Going 70mph.

So I’ll go with simple, clean and neat (I now drive a ten year old Jeep Cherokee). I don’t need to look good. Especially if it means I’m going to be uncomfortable and at risk.

All I need to do is get there.

Things any car should be able to do. But having one that can do it easily, economically, reliably and is comfortable to use?

Priceless!

back

16 – You can get a primer on migrating users between interfaces in Site ReDesign to Maximize Visitor Acceptance and Branding.

I also need to add here that I’ll be posting some of NextStage’s research findings about who prefers “sexy” interfaces and why on The Analytics Ecology. It has been truly fascinating (at least to me) as it deals with why some people prefer “sexy” pages and others don’t. It has little to do with the page and lots to do with people’s feelings and attitude towards what’s offered and who’s doing the offering.

back

17 – At one point Charles wanted to know if we’d be designing for all the different devices out there. I asked some NSSA beta testers and our Advisors and the universal response was “Don’t design for everything, you’ll go nuts.”

So when someone contacted me to let me know our menu didn’t show up on their mobile device — everything else worked fine, all the images showed up, but the menu didn’t work — my first thought was that this was a fascinating piece of information that hearkened back to “Don’t design for everything, you’ll go nuts”.

But this wasn’t a design issue, it was a usability issue. The menus not showing up means the site was unusable to this person and lack of usability is a concern.

But wait a second…I have data on how many bounces our new sites are getting and the numbers are decreasing from what they were (our old site had 19% bounce rate. It’s less than that now). This individual, not being able to navigate and leaving the site after one page, would be considered a bounce.

And I have a fairly good idea of the ratio that forms between some one person sharing information and how many non-sharers that person probably represents.

And that number is still lower than our bounce rate, so the number of people coming to our sites on mobile devices that don’t load our menus is…

I checked with some people anyway. That’s the way I am. Overly cautious, highly methodical, a RESEARCHER, remember?

I know quite a few people with mobile devices; LG smartphones, iPhones, ‘Droids, … Were there any other mobile devices having problems? It turned out that menu-appearment was device dependent and the mobile device market is highly in flux. As one person explained to me, “The menus show up. I have to do a “long press” for the drop down to work. But my phone reads that input as wanting to save the image. I can back out of that and then click on the expanded menu though. Many touch-screen phones are just that. Predominately single-touch menu interfaces. Something like a rollover on a typical website may take some finagling to get to. Depending on how the site is coded I’ve had the phone bring up its own menu of the items in the drop down. But that varies from site to site.”

So we’re not going to worry about that right now. When we get lots and lots and lots of people coming to our sites over mobile devices, maybe, and not right now, thanks.

But don’t you love it when the data actually unequivocally undeniably indicates both what to do and how to do it?

I just love that.

Final comment on this thread: this individual suggested NextStage hire a web designer/programmer so we wouldn’t have to worry about things like this in the future.

Thanks. Great suggestion. Getting bit for US$78k once was enough, though.

back

18 – We once set forth a bunch of our researchers on a bright summer day, each of them wearing a t-shirt with our little homunculus on the front. A little girl wanted to know what other toys we made but all the adults asked what kind of psychological testing service, counseling agency, opinion research, … we did.

back

The Center for Adaptive Solutions, a thinktank I’m associated with, is doing a series of workshops in 2010, all around the theme of using social media in… well, pretty much everything. Business, NGOs, GOs, non-profits, … and the verticals we’re covering range from health to politics to retail to distribution (let me know if you’d like us to do one for you and I’ll hook you up). All the workshops start with the assumption that you should be in the social media game in some way, shape or form.

So I was completely shocked when I got an email from a workshop sponsor. Someone contacted the sponsor and offered that these workshops — because they assumed people knew they should be in the game — weren’t for them. They didn’t know if they should be in the social media game or not.

The sponsor wanted to know my response.

Well…umm…hmm…

Ever Hear of Market Competition?

That person’s organization has a website. I went there and extracted some key phrases that the organization uses to define itself, its purpose, its offerings, its scope, its this and that. The only thing I removed from these phrases was self-identifying information (organization name, location, that kind of thing).

Then I replaced the organization’s location with the locations of six similar organizations across the US and Googled each of these separately.

The six other searches averaged 101,200 blog entries for the same purpose, same definition, same key phrases. Average web entries was 34,900. Average YouTubes was equally high.

The organization that’s not sure it should be using social media? Seven blog posts.

Seven.

7

This time out, 7 is probably an unlucky number. Web entries are just under 5,500.

So I’m guessing that these similar initiatives across the US have some time if not money invested in social media campaigns. Nobody gets over 100,000 blog entries without trying…something.

And business rules more or less dictate that organizations don’t invest in initiatives that have zero or negative ROI.

Long story short, I figure this organization is losing over US$2,000 for every marketing dollar it spends because it’s not using social media.

This means every dollar they spend getting their word out is costing them US$2,000.

$2,000. Poof!

Funding sources, grant making institutions, corporate sponsors, … want to fund initiatives they believe will be successful.

100,000 versus 7.

Who is more successful using social media to get their story out? Who gets the grant?

$2,000. Poof!

And forget funding if you’re not in the funding game. What about simply getting the word out to those who can use your services?

Seven entries? Seven entries??? Again, Poof!

The Want of a Nail

People who know me know I’m a Luddite, frugal, that I tend towards caution, … I do not do things simply because others do them, so on and so forth.

But I will admit this organization’s concern caught me off guard. There is evidence far in excess of the simple exercise demonstrated here indicating if not demonstrating that social media done correctly is a boon to an organization’s growth and profitability. At least right now. Give things a few years and who knows.

And if nothing else, put it in terms of income, audience awareness and market reach.

• This particular organization is losing dollars because their competition (and I just surveyed in the US, not the world) is marketing in a way this organization isn’t.
• This organization’s audience can’t find them unless that audience knows specifically and unequivocally what they’re searching for (the organization didn’t show up in a general keyword search in the first ten search pages).
• Market reach is effectively 0 when people who want to give you money or buy your products/services can’t find you but can find your competition with little effort.

There is absolutely no reason an organization’s rider needs to be overtaken and slain in today’s interconnected world, especially for lack of a social media nail, don’t you think?
(My thanks to CAS Brother Tom Bigda-Peyton for his thoughts and comments on this post prior to publication.)

If you’ve been following along, you know NextStage is poised to release a set of web-based tools based on its long proven desktop technology. If you’re wondering why it hasn’t happened yet (at least at the consumer level) it’s because we’re rebranding and rebuilding the NextStage store.

A recent discussion between myself, NextStage’s CTO and the VP Technology of a third company was incredibly rewarding (for me, anyway. I learned how Evolution Technology’s neuromathematics is implemented in software). There was one element of that discussion that truly caught my attention.

It dealt with whether or not new tools should require training in order to be successfully and completely utilized. One reason this element caught my attention is because I’m busily writing Chapter 2 of Reading Virtual Minds Volume 2, the chapter entitled “Usability”.

And lest you think everything at NextStage is de facto sympatico, nay nay. The disagreement was between myself and our CTO, Charles.

Readers who follow my postings here, there and everywhere probably know my position on the subject (see Learning to Use New Tools if you don’t). Charles’ position (Charles, please feel free to comment here if I’m incorrect) is that any tool should be so simple no training is needed in its use.

The truth is Charles and I disagree on a reasonable amount of things. My feeling is that while our disagreements make for good conversation they don’t matter much otherwise.

This disagreement, though…

Defining “New”

Things are defined as new in experience when there is no basis for them in prior experience. “Newness” is, therefore, a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma, of a sort. Humans learn by pigeon-holing things. We are designed to like similarities, to prefer metaphors and similes, because they allow us to decide quickly whether or not something is good or bad for us.

This is excellent from an evolutionary neuroanatomy standpoint. We learn that something is good for us and we spend the rest of our lives determining if everything else fits that model. Example: Food goes in our mouths. It could be argued that “food goes in our mouths” is the first lesson babies learn. It goes without argument that babies spend a great deal of their time putting everything else within reach in their mouths, much to the terror of parents, older siblings, so on and so forth.

This “food goes in our mouths” can also be argued as humans’ first lesson in applied logic and how not to form an argument. Consider the following:

1. Food is something that goes in the mouth.
2. Food is good.
3. Therefore anything that goes in the mouth is good.

The example most often used in elementary logic classes to teach this is something like “Homer was male. Homer was Greek. Therefore all Greeks are male.” and is called Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent (yes, I’ve taken a few liberties. If you’d like a formal introduction to logic, let me know and I’ll hook you up).

This early lesson makes itself known in English by such phrases as “It left a bad taste in his mouth”, in Italian (translated into English) as “I’d like a small taste”, and the simile and metaphor aspect comes in because these phrases are rarely used to describe foodstuffs. The former most often describes a negative experience and the latter most often describes a request for some small part in a business transaction.

Thus those first life lessons — food goes in the mouth — is used throughout life to symbolize the good and bad of things. How many of us have bitten off more than we could chew? Or had eyes bigger than our stomachs? And while these are all variants of “food goes in the mouth” metaphors, how often are they used strictly for foods and mouths?

What is recognized in all the above is Charles’ being accurate within some semantic considerations; tools should be so simple no training is needed in their use.

I completely agree with Charles’ statement provided that some metaphor or simile — some pigeonhole — exists in our experience in which said tool comfortably fits. Or at least can be hammered into without lots of destruction to either the tool, the pigeonhole or the hammer.

And I’m guessing that the majority of readers of this post understood the previous paragraph. At least the readers who’ve had some experience with hammers, with forcing something to fit into something else (packing suitcases for a trip, for example), with “pigeonholing”, …

But at some point nothing we do will make what’s in front of us fit into our experience. The “food” is not only too big to fit in our mouth, it puts up a fight. Someone may even come along and inform us that what we’re shoving in our mouths isn’t food at all, it’s our sister’s pet.

What occurs now is called confusion and according to Michael Gelb, “Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.”

Confusion occurs in humans (all self-aware, cognitive species, actually) when there is no past experience — no pigeonhole — that is a comfortable or even hammerable fit for present experience. What literally happens is a trans-derivational search, the brain can’t provide the mind with an acceptable fit so the mind tells the brain to go look again and again and again and again. Each “and again” request is sent with an increasing sense of urgency (regardless if there is any need for urgency) and eventually panic sets in.

Unless the mind accepts the brain’s “this is beyond my experience” information and sends a different request; “This is something new. Make room for it.”

Children are constantly making room for new things. They have to. For one, their brains and minds haven’t differentiated much so there’s lots less confusion because everything is new to them. Second, they don’t have a whole lot of experience to go on so again, everything is new.

It’s that different request, that “This is something new. Make room for it” that leads to creativity.

Dear God Don’t Make Me Think! If I Think, Things Might Change

Creativity…that spark that ignites from within the mind and expresses the heart…

The ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey that stopped seeing the tapir’s femur as the remains of a meal and started seeing it as a hammer was — dare I write it? — evolving to the — I’m going to do it again — next stage along the path to becoming human. Us. This happened because the ape saw something that conflicted with its previous experience; when the femur struck other bones they shattered and flew apart. It had seen bones shatter and fly apart countless times, no doubt.

The newness was recognizing that the bones were shattering and flying apart because of something he was doing.

Instead of running away from the wildly flying bones — the panic reaction that kept us safe in the wilds for ever so long…well, long enough to become us — this ape made new space in its brain for the new experience.

And by doing so it created a tool unlike any that had ever been known before.

Then the ape showed its new tool to some friends. Many of them scattered. Some the first ape was able to train, not necessarily in how to create new tools, but at least in how to use this tool.

An interesting part of this is that most humans don’t like change. There’s no way to avoid it because everything changes, so humans spend lots of time and money minimizing what changes in their lives or at least controlling what changes and how so things don’t change unless they’re prepared for it.

So again, tools that require no training, that can be operated and understood based entirely on past experience, are ideal.

But again, there’s a catch here.

Who’s experience should a new tool be based on? There comes a point where people’s experiences are going to diverge due to culture, language, regionality, … If this wasn’t the case, you could ask for some soda anywhere in the USA and be assured of getting some kind of caramel-colored, carbonated concoction. Charles and I have highly divergent backgrounds. Tools that are completely understandable to me are (so he tells me) a mystery to him and vice versa.

I remember going to a microbiology lab party at Dartmouth. The hostess held up what’s shown on the right. Before reading further, any ideas what it is?

Well, she held it up to the 25-30 extremely bright, highly intelligent, PhD candidates, post docs and professors assembled and asked, “Who knows what this is?”

And I stopped chatting with Cathy Lukaize and Susan, looked up, offhandedly said, “It’s a molinillo, you use it to stir hot chocolate in Mexico,” and went back to my conversation.

The hostess shook her head. “I should have known you’d know what it was, Joseph.”

But nobody else did and the reason was simple. It was not a tool they had been trained to recognize, they had no experience of it and there was no survival-based requirement that they make a new place for it in their brain so aside from being an interesting party gadget…

It’s also worth noting that I wouldn’t know what to do in their labs if I had to. Such microbiology work was completely out of my experience. I had no place in my brain for the tools they routinely used.

So tools should be obvious and require no training providing they are completely based on your past experience. It must be completely based, it can’t even be fundamentally based on past experience. Fundamentally based means your back to hammering something into the pigeonhole to make it fit, which is a metaphor for either taking a class or training yourself in the tool’s use.

Once you get past that, you either have to be creative, intuitive (something that neuroscience indicates only comes with lots of highly divergent experiences) or trained.

I mean, I know Charles is one heck of a CTO. I don’t think it happened in some moment in time when he said, “Ah, from this point forward, I am going to be one heck of a CTO!” But I do know he was able to take something I’d written that took ten or so minutes of processing time and make it produce reports in less than ten seconds. Does he understand the math? He says no. Do I understand his code? Not really.

I know it took me a heck of a time to get my knowledge in the fields in which people now hire me. And (stating this purely for example purposes only) I didn’t create “a whole new field of technology” (according to the USPTO, those aren’t my words) by running away from splintered bones and tapir’s femurs.

Learning to use tools that aren’t based on your experience also means the tools are new to you. You can get past this newness tolerance break if you’re willing to go further and further back in someone’s experiential matrix until you find the point where their experience diverged from yours, then bring them along on your path.

This means the question becomes “How far back do you want to go?” Somethings, believe it or not, may require teaching people that oddly colored, cold, sticky substances go right good in the mouth.

Othertimes, me thinks, it’s simply easier to start with “This is a new tool and you’re going to require some training in its use.”

Don’t you think?

NextStage’s CTO, Charles, Responds…

Frankly, I don’t recall the exact words I used, but if I used “…is that any tool should be so simple no training is needed in its use.” I would say that I stated it poorly. I don’t believe this formulation anyway.

We were speaking, at the time, about software tools. And, based on long experience (;-)) working with both software and users extensively, I long ago reached the conclusion that this is true for software tools. I don’t believe that this conclusion is different from your own, I just come at the same issues with different ends in mind, and this formulation is specific to software.

Pretend for a moment that ET doesn’t exist. Never did.

Virtually all end user software tools have been created to do something (or do something faster) that people were already doing or trying to do. Almost by definition, there is a certain level of familiarity going into it for most of the people who have laid out cash to purchase software. The most straightforward example is accounting software. People have been tallying possessions for centuries, and by the time computers came along, they had come up with some fairly universal rules for how it should be done. The first accounting software was simply a translation of those rules and activities. The people who bought it usually knew the rules and were looking for the part of the tool that performed the familiar task and trying to discern how to make this tool perform this task. They knew how to do it with a calculator and pencil and were seeking the specific procedure needed to repeat it here.

Take someone with no understanding of accounting, and, sure enough, they will be lost. They’ll be trying to learn two things at once (three if they’re new to computers, as well) and the task will be overwhelming because all aspects of it are out of their understanding and experience. Normally, in a business setting, this is not the case. You don’t take someone off the warehouse floor and plop them in front of an accounts receivable package and expect output. If you did, you’d be an idiot to expect your balance sheet to be correct the next day.

But if you take someone who’s been doing the accounting for a company, put them in front of a package and they aren’t able to even recognize the major functions they expect to be able to do, then the problem is with the tool. (The essential point here is that they’re not trying to do something new, they’re trying to do something old in a new way. More on this later).

The problem is akin to the issue of simplicity. I noticed in college that asking a grad student a simple question about a complex subject would usually result in a mish mash of an answer. Ask the same question of a good professor with long years experience in the subject, and you’d get a clear, concise answer that elucidated the subject and resulted in “AHA” understanding. Not a newly sprouted expertise, mind you, but understanding. I realized that until you really understand something, you can’t state it simply. And if you can state it simply, it’s because you really understand the subject.

(Remember, we’re still pretending ET doesn’t exist).

The same bears true in software tools, I believe. Until you can set it up so that it can be used simply, either you haven’t really gotten the point of having software in the first place, or you don’t understand the task the software is supposed to perform well enough. And people who have created software that lacks that simple interface generally make software that has other failings, as well, usually because they didn’t really understand what they were about. I’ve seen this often enough that whenever I see a company that emphasizes that it provides training in its software to handle standard business functions, alarm bells go off.

(In particular because in many years of asking how computer classes went, the response has invariably been that the teacher was either good or bad, but the material studied didn’t have much to do with what the user was going to be using the software for).

(Did you remember we’re still pretending ET doesn’t exist? Hang in there. It can spontaneously generate soon.)

In what may seem like an off-subject ramble: Accountants love spreadsheets. (I knew a banker, once, who wrote all his business letters in Lotus123). Pages of columns and rows and formulas. And it all recalculates automagically. What else could you ask for in life? Few accountants/bookkeepers I’ve known really like databases much. And only the smart ones really understand that some things work better in spreadsheets and others work better in databases. Most think in terms of putting everything new into their favorite hammer, a spreadsheet. And I’ve seen some of them do amazing things. And I’ve seen other devote hundreds of hours of labor to making spreadsheets do a task that would have taken half an hour to create using a database.

Truth be told, spreadsheets and databases share some essential basics, and each can do most of what the other can do, if you know what you’re doing and spend enough time tweaking them. The proper choice depends on which kind of task you need to do most efficiently. Knowing the proper choice has a direct impact on how easy it is for others to use the tool you create.

And when I first dove into this discussion with Joseph, I pointed out that I had seen people use Dremel Mototools to do amazing carvings that were incredibly beyond my capabilities, but that I have often used Dremel Mototools to take the heads off screws. Same tool. Different purpose.

His response (if I’m remembering it correctly, can’t seem to find it) was that the artist could take the head off the screw much better and more skillfully.

Well, that’s probably true, but I doubt I could get him to come to my messy garage to take the head off of a screw for the amount I’m willing to pay him.

(OK, the time has come. Abra-cadabra, POOF! ET has just sprung back into existence).

“Whoa! What is that?!?”

“It’s something new. It lets you do an amazing number of things we could never do before.” (Here follows a long list).

Cool. Can it do. . .” (Here follows another long list, almost all of which are answered by either “yes” or “yes, but. . .”). “Wow. That’s amazing. But I don’t understand all of these things. How does it work? I’m getting a headache. Hey, is this blood coming out of my ears?”

“I know. It’s a new thing. Almost nobody understands it. But I can teach you how to use it.”

“OK. So that means there’s a manual I have to read?”

(Sorry, couldn’t resist poking a little fun).

I see now that I really used the wrong tool in my analogy. I should have used the computer itself. With more than a couple of decades worth of experience, I dug down deep into half a dozen different software tools to create a new tool that did something fairly straightforward with another tool I don’t completely understand, but can relate to things that I do understand. Did all of this on my desktop computer, then uploaded it to another computer that served web pages. I was using old tools and new tools to make another complex new tool to do a complex new thing.

Meanwhile, my 76-year-old mother-in-law is using her computer to check her email and avoid a trip to the drug store by creating birthday cards. A complex new tool to do simple old things efficiently and conveniently. The tools she’s using are complex beneath the surface, but the interface is — trust me — necessarily simple. She can use them because she’s known a long time how to communicate with the written word, and she understands the concept of the birthday card — and the interface is simple.

The interface for the NSSA tool is pretty simple. Little if any training is necessary, and that can be provided in a few lines of text on the page. The output, on the other hand, is some extraordinarily complex stuff. The software requires virtually no training. Understanding and effectively using the output requires a fair amount. But let’s go back to the warehouse guy that somebody plopped down in front of the accounts receivable package. His problem is not that the software is too complex, but that he doesn’t know what a chart of accounts is. The same package can be quite simple and obvious to the bookkeeper because it’s designed for him/her. It is possible, however, using the same package to train the same warehouse worker to fill out a bill of lading. I’ve done it. Took ten minutes. He’d filled out lots of bills of lading before.

I don’t believe any of this challenges the babies putting things into their mouths blog entry. Never had a moment’s disagreement with any of that. I just think it limits ET too much.

My position is not that ET should only be used if it’s dumbed down enough that anybody can use it. My position is that ET is a tool of such versatility and power that it — like computers — can be used to 1) do things that are new and complex and need at least a modicum of training in the disciplines behind them and 2) also do familiar old things in new, improved ways that make those things faster and more convenient, and 3) several variations along a continuum between the two.

In many of these instances, it should not be necessary to understand accounting if all you want to do is fill out a bill of lading. (One of the things I’ve also learned is that, while it might be useful to have your warehouse guy understand accounting, it simply ain’t gonna happen). But it is kind of important for the screen to have elements that are recognizable as bill of lading items.

So there.

Joseph Responds

Well, stated, Charles. Thank you.

The only thing I could possibly add to this is (once again, Serendipity doing it’s job in my life) today’s quote, Never forget that it is a waste of time to do the same thing twice, and that if you know precisely what is to be done, you need not do it personally at all. Forces are faster than human hands, they are tireless and they neither slip nor make mistakes. (Rovol), because it seems so fitting.

Other thoughts/comments, anyone?

I had the privilege of being one of the beta testers for NextStage Sentiment Analysis (NSSA) over recent weeks, and this is a total rewrite of my original report of my experience. Doing sentiment analysis on your own writing can be quite a revelation – it can definitely put you in your place. First of all, let me tell you a couple short things about me. I have worked in web analytics for about ten years. I view NextStage’s work as a kind of brave new world (that has such people in it!) that – even with careful and patient guidance – feels just beyond the edge of what I can comprehend. I will tell you honestly that, unlike (probably) other beta testers, I have not experienced a need for sentiment analysis in my job. What I am saying is that my testing approach and my desire to be involved came simply out of analytical curiosity. I didn’t come with a pile of case studies, or anything like that. I am going to do my best here to tell you about my experience. I invite you to ask me any questions that you think I may be able to help with, and I understand if you’d feel more comfortable ignoring this kind of layman-style review.
I am going to start by telling you why this is a total rewrite, even though you’ve probably guessed. I ran sentiment analysis on my first draft and it flagged high for some things I felt were fairly negative, and indicated I would be doing any readers a disservice. I will start with what was not surprising, and explain it to you. I flagged very low for confidence (the scale originally conceived as the BS meter). This is not surprising – as I described above, I am no expert on sentiment analysis (by a LONG shot) and I don’t think I spent enough time being clear about that in my original draft. And despite Joseph Carrabis’s efforts, I always feel a bit of an interloper here in this world of neuroscientific analysis. However, I grasp what my scientific value to the beta effort is: analyst. So I hereby am attempting to provide you with analysis, which should go better. I am sure my confidence will still be low, because that’s my nature, but it shouldn’t be quite so abysmal.
What surprised (and cowed) me was that I also scored very highly for “Retribution” and “Troll”. I see why I scored high on Troll. My tone in the first write was flippant, in a failed effort to project a bit of confidence. I made a few jokes inside, mostly of the variety that would only be funny to me, referencing Dr Seuss and throwing in statements informing you that you could ignore that, etc. Retribution really knocked me over though, and I’ve spent a few days pondering it (without reaching out for help, just as a test). I’ve decided that it was two factors: because of the research I did for my review and my references back to web analytics (which were largely flippant and probably didn’t help my Troll score either). But let me talk about that separately. I hope you’ll stick with me here!
If you’ve read the previous postings on sentiment analysis (I put a list of the ones I found most useful at the end of this posting), you know that in NextStage’s view you need multiple dimensions of data to determine sentiment truly. In preparation for writing this review article, I read a few articles on sentiment analysis. I didn’t do this in a particularly scientific way, I just sort of “turned up” my sensitivity to the term in my regular reading. I took this approach because I wanted to get a feel for what my peers (web analysts) thought sentiment analysis was. Or where it was failing, what was needed, etc. Every article I read talked about scoring a statement (usually a Tweet) as positive, negative, or neutral. Sometimes neutral was omitted. Because I did this “research” after doing my beta testing, you can imagine I had some preconceived notions about why this was inadequate. I likened these people to those that use web analytics only for Hits! (pretty cruel, really) Now, you (or heck, even Joseph) may argue that that can’t cause the retribution flag. That was the best I could come up with after pondering.
Which brings me to a very key point: I had the benefit of Joseph’s help through the beta process. The NSSA results (in current form – I understand plans are to work on this) are really not information that the average analyst can walk up and interpret. I don’t tell you this to trouble you; I am just telling you that the data is nuanced. My first beta interpretation was wrong in so many ways that it could easily fill another post. And, even though I’ve described reports and values individually, they are actually interdependent. For instance, not only was my confidence low, but I scored low on trust and affinity. That’s because I have a very limited idea of who follows Joseph – I know you’re not all web analysts. There’s a good chance some of you think web analytics is total bunk pseudo-analysis! I do not expect that number to improve on this review. I am struggling to give you a clear picture of how the various values interweave, but they truly do, which is a key point. Just like you cannot rely on a single isolated metric or KPI in web analytics, you cannot rely on a single metric in sentiment analysis.
So, to summarize before this gets so long as to be unreadable: the analysis is eerily accurate and eye-opening to say the least. If you write or read, you will probably find yourself in need or at least in want of this tool at some point in your life. I find no evidence out there that there is a comparable tool at your disposal, so when you find yourself needing to know author sentiment (including your own sentiment) you will come back to NSSA.

Thank you for reading,
Jen
Twitter: @jdaysy
Skype: cmjenday

P.S. As promised, the four postings that I leaned heavily on during the beta:

• http://www.bizmediascience.com/2009/06/sentiment_analysis_anyone_part.html
• http://www.bizmediascience.com/2009/06/canoeing_with_stephane_sentime.html
• http://triquatrotritecale.hungrypeasant.com/?p=25
• http://triquatrotritecale.hungrypeasant.com/?p=40

For reasons ununderstandable to me, there’s much overt and covert discussion about whether online analytics is hard or not, or even if it should be.

It seems an odd discussion to me. I regularly receive analytics reports on my various blogs and such. Interesting to look at and nothing I recognize as actionable. Guessable, yes, obviously actionable, no. I also receive NextStageish reports on my various blogs and such. Those let me know what my readers are thinking and responding internally. Much more valuable (to me) than “clicks on a page” because now I know why they clicked or didn’t.

For example, today I was sent Fascinating and frightening, but real magic! a customer review of Reading Virtual Minds V1: Science and History on Amazon.com. The review took me by surprise:

“What started as an exploration into how I might provide a better user experience to website visitors quickly turned into a journey of self exploration. Joseph Carrabis is able to explain complex subjects in simple and easy to understand text. This book solidified so many connections for me that on more than one occasion I thought to myself “WOW, so that’s why people do that!”
“As you get to the end of the book it becomes clear that ET in the wrong hands could be a bad thing. Yet, it’s exciting to think of all the positive and good uses for this sophisticated technology. The book really sparked my imagination and I can’t wait for volume II!”

I thanked Ms. Flatt via Twitter. Her comments are, to me, sweeter than wine, finer than gold, bluer than the most midnight sky and truer than my heart with my lovely Susan beside me.

Ms. Flatt’s review is an example of someone getting it. No study, no work, nothing is going to be as fulfilling as the work, study, play, whatever, you do that helps you discover yourself, helps you learn how to be a better being, a better you.

But the person getting it needs to be ready, willing and able to do the work involved in getting it.

And although I’ve been talking, teaching and presenting on such topics for over 20 years now, there is still no greater thrill for me than knowing someone has peeled that onion back just a little bit, has peered into the face of their own internal gods, has learned who, what, when, where, why and how they are and has started down the path of getting it.

Because to truly be of service to another you must first learn to be the other. One way to do that is to learn more about yourself, the peeling of the onion, and in most cases be prepared to cry.

My opinion, that.

The work is often challenging, the path often difficult, the rewards always wonderful and worth it.

My opinion, that, as well.

So although I don’t recognize online analytics as “hard”, I do recognize harder paths, such as the one of self-discovery.

I’m about to take such a harder path, this time volunteering for Web Analytics Without Borders (WAWB). This is the harder path (in my opinion) because rolling up one’s proverbial sleeves and offering to help is inherently more challenging than complaining about a problem, pointing out the errors others are making in working towards solutions and not getting involved oneself. The resources outside of oneself when volunteering are minimal if they exist at all therefore the resources must come from within, which means one must discover them, hence it is a path of self-discovery and inherently harder than otherwise.

So you, Dear Reader…are you willing to challenge yourself to make life less challenging for others? Contact Stephane Hamel or Adam Laughlin at WAWB.

And thanks.

I read Tomorrow never knows, an article on whether or not sciences should be in the business of predicting…anything.

It was a good and thoughtful article and I agree with most of it, especially with “Predictions are not instructions that people simply follow to make better decisions. They are pieces of an intricate puzzle that may sometimes contribute to improved decisions.”

Penecontemporaneously (a word no longer in use in English, sadly, and meaning “all at the same time”), I’ve been reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds. Much of this book offers historical accounts of speculation markets and favored predictive methodologies throughout time, all of which seem to fail and all of which are based on individuals believing they could predict the future.

There are interesting points to be made by intersecting the two, me thinks.

The Function of Science

For example, the sole function of science, any science, is to explain the “world”. Science explains the world by discovering and defining laws, the Xs that equal Ys, that govern interactions.

This means science de facto is in the prediction business. If not, 2+2 can equal whatever you want and (follow the logic) then science is undeniably in the prediction business. If 2+2 can equal whatever I want then my ability to predict any outcome is predestined to be 100% accurate.

What neither article nor book makes clear is that it is people — business, politicians, educators, moms&dads worldwide — and not science that is responsible for any failed prediction because people seem to confuse scientific prediction with precognition (”foreknowledge”).

“Predictions are not instructions that people simply follow to make better decisions” is, in my experience, a very true and sad statement. People get upset when they follow instructions and the results don’t look like what’s on the cover or page or website. And “decisions” imply human conscious volition, not an abdicating of responsibility and will. I know people prefer to have no responsibilities, I don’t know many people who wake up each morning and proudly proclaim “Today I’m going to be completely irresponsible.”

The other line, “They are pieces of an intricate puzzle that may sometimes contribute to improved decisions”, is also (I believe) a truism. I wrote a little about mathematical predictive abilities in Addendum to “Minimizing Mistakecule Probabilities”. Predicting an absolute future is doable, yes, and not something I suggest doing with any regularity. Collapsing all those manifolds requires incredible amounts of energy.

Not sure what I’m writing about in that last paragraph?

Okay, let me explain it this way…

The ability to predict the future absolutely means Calvinism rules and there is no free will. I appreciate the appeal of this. It hearkens back to the ability to be completely irresponsible because you’re not responsible for anything, it’s all predetermined, and even your irresponsibility was predestined, therefore you’re not really being irresponsible, you’re being completely responsible by taking on the role of irresponsibility, …

And yes, I’m having fun with this. The number of errors in the above statements is amusing.

Ahem.

More seriously, please don’t relinquish your decision making authority to any tool claiming predictive capability beyond what can be reasonably and accurately measured.

These are the keys in both the article and the book; beyond what can be reasonably and accurately measured. You can increase the validity of your decisions via predictive analysis so long as you know, recognize and share the point where your decisions go beyond what can be reasonably and accurately measured.

Once you go beyond what can be reasonably and accurately measured, it all comes down to experience, intuition and luck, and to paraphrase the Apostle Paul, “The greatest of these is Luck.”

Example

Last night Susan and I were playing cards. About 1/4 of the way through the game she made a comment about her not winning and I smiled. I smiled because 1/4 of the way through the game it was completely obvious to me she was going to win, even though any “rational” observer of the game would claim I was greatly in the lead and had all the advantages.

How did I know she would win the game? Because I knew how many cards were in the decks (it was a two deck game), how many cards had been played, what cards had been played and the order they’d been played. The outcome, at that point in our play, was predetermined (barring mistakes neither of us often makes). In short, she’d have to play incredibly poorly to lose, and she never plays poorly.

I was able to predict the outcome, to use predictive analytics, because the system I was predicting was incredibly well defined, I could measure past and existing states with excellent accuracy and the number of possible outcomes was severely limited.

Predicting the future isn’t difficult to do. You just have to choose your manifolds carefully to conserve energy.

Have I ever mentioned that I’m not allowed in casinos? Not since the 1980s, anyway.

Surprised, huh?

First my thanks to everyone who took part in the Phase 1 Beta test of NextStage’s Sentiment Analysis (NSSA) Tool. This post covers modifications we made thanks to their comments and follows on Understanding and Using NextStage’s Level 1 Sentiment Analysis Tool.

Changes

• Our developers installed the high-speed data system. Analyses that use to take 10 minutes now take about 60 seconds.
• We added the Level 2 reports (beta testers will be seeing them in their outputs).
• Level 2 users will also be able to download a XLS of the results (per Chris Berry’s request).
• We modified two of the Level 1 reports.

First the newly added Level 2 reports.

Level 2 Reports

Rene suggested using The 10 Must Marketing Messages, Trust, Affinity, Author Rich Persona, Target Rich Persona and Worst Rich Persona.

Author Rich Persona

The Author Rich Persona report lists both the author’s Rich Persona and key elements of their {C,B/e,M} matrix. “{C,B/e,M}” is a shorthand notation for the Cognitive, Behavioral effective, Motivational matrix, a tool that calculates how an individual thinks about, responds to and is driven by any information in their environment. Knowing any individual’s or group’s {C,B/e,M} grants unprecedented knowledge of how to craft a message in order to generate a desired response or propagate a message to that individual or group (I can provide a long bibliography for those interested).

For example, a typical Author Rich Persona report looks like the following:

---

Author Rich Persona – This report will present the type of RP that has written the text (eg. V3) and a bulleted description of his characteristics.

This material was most likely written by an individual with a V14 Rich Persona. Key features of their {C,B/e,M} include:

• These people are strongly motivated by what they see
• They are success oriented
• Presentations with emotions must be positive in nature
• They make decisions based on what feels “right”, “correct” or “best”

Lastly, this individual probably falls into the following Myers-Briggs categories:
ISFJ, ISFP, INFP, ESFJ, ENTJ.

---

You can think of The Author RP Report as a kind of Me casa e su casa, meaning that people communicate best with those whose RPs and {C,B/e,M}s are identical to their own. The more identical, the easier the communication and the more easily shared complex cognitive and emotional concepts. Part of my training was learning how to shift my {C,B/e,M} at will to match those of people I was communicating with. Doing so enable me to better understand and respond to them, what is called establishing rapport.

So the above is telling you the author’s {C,B/e,M} casa. They will most effectively communicate with people whose casa is their casa. This is great if their {C,B/e,M} is the same or relatively close to the {C,B/e,M} of the largest possible population segment.

But if it’s not, then the most they can hope to immediately and directly engage is the population segment corresponding to their own {C,B/e,M} casa. They will capture the attention of population segments with {C,B/e,M}s close to their own and how much attention is captured (and then turned into engagement) depends on how psychographically distant the author’s {C,B/e,M} is from reader {C,B/e,M}s.

And before going any further, remember we’re just analyzing the Author’s RP. Including Target and Worst Rich Personae would have expanded that listing some 40 times! And without training?

Desired Intent and PsychoGraphic Desired Intent

Instead we’re offering a variant of some things Chris Berry requested in his original “Boy, if only I could find a Sentiment Analysis tool that did this” list , Desired Intent and Psychographic Desired Intent. Chris’ specific requests were:

• The likelihood that the message will have the desired intent based on psychographic distance from the author.
• The ability for the tool to return a CSV (or some other file) listing the social graph of the {C, B/e, M} profiles in relationship to each other within a specific tribe, in general, for the purposes of segmenting discussions based on expert areas. (Testing the 1957 “Word-of-Mouth” studies and the whole air conditioning patterns for new product introductions.)

What I came up with is the chart on the right (and it helps if you know some social mechanics. I can provide a bibliography if you’d like). The leftmost column indicates how much of the best audience will respond as the author desires. The center column indicates how much of the next best audience will get the message and respond. The rightmost column indicates how much of the worst audience will get the message and respond.

The concepts being used in these determinations involve psychological distance. The leftmost column indicates people in the target audience who think the way the author thinks, believes what they believe, learns the way they learn, decides the way they decide, …. all that exact-matching {C,B/e,M} stuff. The middle column can be likened to you listening to someone and responding that you think you agree with them and there’s a few things you need clarification on. The rightmost column can be likened to you listening to someone and disagreeing with them but not knowing why you disagree.

The 10 Must Marketing Messages

This chart shows the relative intensities of ten messages that must be communicated in all media if the audience is going to positively respond.

I emphasize relative intensities because (my opinion) showing a scale of 0-100% doesn’t indicate how strongly a message was communicated, only that it had a certain intensity when compared to other messages. Normalization (such as scoring 0-100%) is useful in some metrics and not in this on (my opinion again). Someone may be communicating “I Can Help You” at 50points and let’s say that all other messages sum out such that the “I Can Help You” message is 50% of all messages being communicated. The next person is communicating the same message but for a different brand and their message is at 500points. Same other rules as above and it also sums out at 50%, but depending on lots of other factors that second message for the different brand wins because of its intensity, not because of how it normalizes when compared to all other messages. Currently NSSA produces normalized because I was out-voted. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Also, I provide more examples of these ten messages in Reading Virtual Minds Vol. 1: Science and History.

Trust

Trust (for the purposes of this tool and thanks to Chris Berry) is defined as “the degree of trust between a person (brand) and a social network contained in the message”. What is being calculated is the author’s non-conscious belief that the audience will accept the message. A low score can indicate that the author doesn’t believe the audience will accept the message, that the author believes a small percentage of the audience will accept the message and so on. It doesn’t make much difference with high scores, you’re good any way you look at it.

Affinity

Level 2 also includes an Affinity Graph (shown on the right). An author’s affinity to their audience is a measure of how much the author believes they are a member of their audience’s greater community. What’s particularly interesting about this chart is that it should not score high for people who also non-consciously think of themselves as either Influencers or GateKeepers because both functions indicate a non-conscious recognition of being separate (in some way, shape or from) from “the herd”. Author’s who score high as Hubs should score high in Affinity because the function of a Hub is to channel knowledge within a community, hence will have a greater self-concept of being a member of their own audience.

Changes to Level 1

Feedback and observing Level 1 users caused me to rethink some of the information in Level 1 and how it was displayed. The changes are to the Confidence (BS) meter and Message Retention Probability.

Message Retention Probability

The Message Retention Probability chart originally showed two data points, how much of an audience will remember the message for 3 or so days and how much of an audience will be branded by the exposure.

Rene suggested I expand this to include some other options. What made sense (I’m open to suggestion on this) was a measure of how much of an audience will

• Understand but Not Remember the message
• Remember but Not Understand the message
• Remember for 3 or so days
• be Basically Branded

Each of the above are rough translations of how much of a message goes into what parts of the brain, long-term (”deep”) memory and cognition. The goal is to have the message lodge in both deep memory and the cognitive centers simultaneously, which is “basically branded”. Note that how large this value is depends a lot on who the intended audience is and how well written something is for that audience.

Suppose what is analyzed shows strongly in “Remember for 3 days or so”. Whatever the message is, it needs to be repeated inside that audience at least once a day for three days in order to shift things to “Basically Branded” (and remember, we’re not monitoring the audience, only the author. The audience would need to see the author’s message three times in three days to internalize the message). An analysis that shows strongly in “Remember but Not Understand” usually indicates that whatever the message is, it needs to be repeated through different channels. Lastly, “Understand but Not Remember” will normally take the lion’s share in any analysis. Note that that audience is not the audience for the message for any of several reasons, it’s simply the largest audience segment out there.

Confidence (BS) Meter

As you can see, the Confidence (BS) Meter is now horizontal and clearly shows the 0 mark. Visually more informative with much less cognitive effort, I think.

Eating Our Own Dogfood Dept

Just for kicks, I ran the original version of this post through NSSA (sans blog interface, just the content). Can you say Ouch!.
So I went in and made edited. Four versions later, this post is what you get.
The differences are in the numbers:

---

		V0 Version	V4 Version
Love Factor
	Positive	33.98	0.87
	Neutral	1.01	98.76
	Negative	65.01	0.36
Confidence		-72.32	-18.64
Message Retention Probability
	Understand But Not Remember	21.46	19.63
	Remember But Not Understand	0	0.25
	3 Days or so	0	0
	Basically Branded	0	0
Message Intent
	Referral	22.55	25.81
	Retribution	28.96	23.53
	Love	-1.54	18.3
	Constructive	24.09	12.43
	Troll	25.93	19.93
Author Influencer Type
	Influencer	28.57	62.41
	GateKeeper	63.23	37.59
	Hub	8.2	0
10 Must Marketing Messages
	We Trust You	8.19	10.23
	You Can Trust Us	18.21	17.02
	This Is Important	2.17	1.26
	This Is Important to You	7.16	6.63
	We Can Help	9.24	12.12
	We Can Help You	24.72	20.86
	You Are Good People	8.24	8.41
	We Are Good People	7.53	8.86
	They Are Not Good People	6.97	5.68
	We Are A Leader	7.57	8.92
Trust		0	10.00935
Affinity		0	7.732702
Author Rich Persona		A15	V1
		MB: ESTP	No MB
Desired Intent and PsychoGraphic Desired Intent
	Desired Intent (First Circle)- A15	71.72	(V1) 29.97
	PsychoGraphic Desired Intent (Outer Circle) – A9,A10,A11,A12,A13,A14,A15,A16	4.95	(V2 ,V1 ,V3 ,V4 ,V5 ,V6 ,V7 ,V8) 2.03
	PsychoGraphic Desired Intent (Outmost Circle) – K23,A7 ,K7,V23,A15,A23,K15,V7 ,V15	0	(A1 ,A9 ,K1 ,A17,K9 ,K17,V1 ,V9,V17) 0

---

Major changes through the revisions were removal of massive bibliographies, caveating, general de-sciencing of the content (I can email the V0 post to any insomniacs with a need). Of particular note is the big change in Desired Intent. The First Circle value scored about half the V0 version of this file. Why? Because I was shifting my {C,B/e,M} from an A15 to a V1 {C,B/e,M} (ResearcherJoseph to BusinessBloggerJoseph). This is a tip of the hat to long time editor Brother Brad Berens who’s been telling me to do the same for years now.

Summarizing….

Beta testers will once again be turned loose by the time this post goes live.

Enjoy and please let me know your thoughts. Tools evolve through use and interaction, and as I explained in Eight Rules for Good Trainings (Rules 1-3) and Eight Rules for Good Trainings (Rules 4-8), I learn from others more (I’m sure) than they may ever learn from me. Example: One of our beta testers is a fellow in his early 20s. My reasoning for including him? Whatever else he does during the day, his interests are going to be very different from mine. He’ll put material through analysis that I don’t even know exists.

Again, thanks and enjoy.

Google and China are involved in an information war. Not a PR thing, they are battling in the ultimate arena; exchange.

People who’ve read Reading Virtual Minds Vol. 1: Science and History and my various blog posts know about fair-exchange, information commerce and the like. Basically whatever goods or services are bought, sold, bartered, …, it all comes down to an exchange of information (from a pure social-semiotic perspective).

If you’re watching carefully I think you’ll notice that this is the most recent (note, most recent, not the first although the first I know of in this century) demonstration of a company, a business, challenging a country for information (again remembering/recognizing that “information” is the ultimate exchange). This is not the metaphorically unwinnable “land war in Asia”, this is for the ultimately unwinnable control of “what people know and how they get what they know”

Anybody remember the original James Caan “Rollerball”? Governments were gone or ineffectual and companies ruled the world. The “opiate of the masses” wasn’t Marx’s religion, it was the hyperviolent Rollerball.

And if Google really is capturing all that data about people that the anxious out there believe they are gathering, hyperviolence is going to be the least of our worries.

I mean, have you played some of those xBox games lately?