Social graph applied to corporate e-mails...

While reading Stephen Baker blog promoting his book, the numerati... I stumbled across a very interesting idea.

Using social graph on corporate e-mails!

Yes!
Stephen Baker talks about a subject that is very close to my heart: modeling human behavior.
Studying all the IBM workers, he can finally put them into a quantitative model of the world.
Efficiency, Knowledge, Sociability, Charisma, everything is finally rated.

You can then design the best training courses, optimize the resources, and put up a virtual assembly line, considering all people like resources and applying the latest of operational research in logistics.

One of the striking example was the social graphs.

Imagine if you drew all the interactions between people as they send e-mails, you would understand the dynamics behind the workplace.
You would see people who work alone, those who are team players, those who can NOT work alone.
Then you would see managers who don't report enough, and studying the keywords, you would understand the fundamentals of each community.

That really killed me. We know how to do this already. We can put it in practice at a corporate level.

Finally, being spied at the work place and knowing that my e-mails are read, I will think twice about sending those, and add some viscosity in the process, therefore slowing down the process.
I will call people more than write them. (until they spy our phones with speech to text technology).

Privacy is now our biggest challenge.
Being spied should never become something natural.

The use of proven openers to meet people

When you try to meet people, at various occasions - including picking up girls, you have got to say something first.

Apart from Chuck Norris, whose pick-up line is "NOW", mortals like me have to settle for something that is somewhat more indirect.

I remember I used to collect pick-up lines because they were fun:

-My name is Ly. Vinh Ly.
-I lost my phone number, can I have yours?
-Nice shoes, wanna f*ck?


Of course, I would never apply them, because they don't really help for sustaining a conversation afterwards.
Most of the time, I would try to gather knowledge of the target, through observation or network.

"Hey Fred, you know that girl over there? Tell me something about her, I need to talk to her"
and you follow to her with
"Hi, I was just talking about horse-riding with Fred and he's just told me you're really into it as well... what a coincidence!"

Those informed openers are the ones I like best. Because, it's customized. Because, it has required an effort from my side.

But there are some sort of proven openers, that we know would work well.

With a friend, we went on the street, and tested one of them with a set of 10 groups we opened with a proven opener. Always the same.

Guess what?
It works.
The groups say the same thing, they get involved in the conversation, and you opened the group.
In the end, it became so boring to use the same old stuff, and it was quite disturbing to see the same old trick work with nearly everyone.

We're just all the same.

We are value-driven robots.

Yup.
I realized it some time ago.

Saying that everyone is different would be a truism.
Saying that people have different values would be a truism as well.

Naturally, as I am telling that to you, you feel that you have experienced that before.
You remember those neverending arguments about something that did not even came close to what you thought you would care about.

Yeah people think differently.
Coming back to the root of all evil is what our experience of the world is.

I remember an argument about two people, whether a divorce between the two parents was a "good" or "bad" thing for the child.
No "good" or "bad" answers. Different contexts. Therefore different values.
One is "Protect the integrity of the family for the child"
One is "Get rid of that tensed atmosphere by seperating"

And behind those values, only positive intention.

ALWAYS believe that there is positive intention.
We're just so messed up we forgot how to communicate.
We're asked to play perfectly with a badly tuned violin.

Getting customers: rules that will not help you

Yup.
That's business. Marketing is all about selling.
If you don't sell, you don't have a business.

So, you will hear: "Think about the customers!"

First rule that will never help you:
Just focus on the first customer.
Once you did that, think about the next one.
Restart the process.

or sometimes:

Think about making $10. Scale that.

Second rule:
Think about your added value. Sell solutions and not a product.

Third rule:
Don't cold call, use warm calls, use recommendations.

Fourth rule:

Listen to your customers.

After some research on the internet, I found little practical advice about getting the customers. Lots of them were Pi in the sky.
Bla bla bla, customer comes first. Customer is ROI.
Ok once you said that, it looks like you said everything.

It is different in real life.
The customer is a spoilt kid. The customer lives in a world of abundance of service and all the crowd revolves around him for a grasp of attention.
F*** that.

Don't beg the customer. You are the provider. He'd be lucky to have your service.
That's why you should be confident.

Say that you're just here to help. Don't brag too much as well :)

Once the perceived value of your service has increased, because you have so many customers, then you can have a conversation. Not a pitch.

It's not how you sell. It's how you discuss. How you find overlaps in your needs.
Because, if you think you have a good product, you can build a trustful relationship.

If your product is cr*p, bundle it with something that's really worthwhile.

Cheers, amigos

7 sin marketing for facebook apps

It seems that making facebook applications is easier than I expected.
Following that simple tutorial from Gath Adams, my app was up and running within a few hours.
All you need is a server and some spare time. (guess what's more valuable?)

Within minutes I was making a simple facebook quizz.
Ok, it was not a killer app, and it lacks the main facebook specificities:
communication.

If you don't ensure you enable a new user-to-users experience, then you've missed the whole point.

Everything is about enabling people to interact.
What's the point of a quizz? It's a occasion to help the user brag about something that's specific to him.
"See how smart I am"
"See what a fun life I have"
"See how many friends I have"

It's the whole social world.
It's a world where developers and marketers should team together to help people interact more.

Leverage that communication can be done with the original sins:
- Lust
- Gluttony
- Greed
- Sloth
- Wrath
- Envy
- Pride

Use those!
Those are the specific guidelines for developing facebookk applications.
By allowing a user to completely experience *choose the specific sin*, make sure the app will create *other specific sin* for other users when they will see their mini feeds.
(e.g Your friends is so cool, 1000 chicks dig him.-> creates pride for user ->envy for the others).

There you go. You'll find more guidelines in the bible.

That's business as usual...

Sometimes, you have very intense work relationship with people...
I remember I have worked with people with whom the project result was less than conclusive.
Several times, the discussion was very tense and we thought we'd never come to an arrangement. Because it seemed that noone was willing to make an effort.
The collaboration failed... but the project lived on.

Guess what, we met again.
No hard feelings. Looking back, we admitted our stubbornness.
We agreed on what went wrong and what should have been done.
That's always easy afterwards.

What's the right dose of personal relationship?
-Personal relationship creates trust. Better communication. More effective collaboration.
-Getting too personal blinds the mind. Should I tell my "friend" that his idea "sucks"? I mean we're going to Ibiza together, let's not spoil the week-end.

British people seem to be able to get drunk with their colleagues and remain professional during work hours, as if nothing happened.

French people don't. We don't party with the boss.
After all, that's the boss.

Get the girl!

Usually, when you look at your spam, close to 70% of the content is sexually explicit.
-Enlarge your penis
-Discounted viagra
-Go see Amy stripping in front of her webcam

The rest is mostly, how to make money online, or why Amid Gronanga in Nigeria put you on his testament, so that you can inherit $100 000 (just need $200 for filing the demand).

But back to pornography, (I have numbers for 2005 and 2006 in US)
Worlwide numbers.

needless to say, the most queried keywords are "porn", "sex" and "xxx".

12% of websites are porn websites
Worlwide pornography is at least a 97 billion dollar market.

So, blabla, the market is big.

What about those who try to find sex in real life?


Well, you have match.com and meetic.fr. (or more commonly adultfriendfinder).
And some people make money explaining how they manage to score with those matchmaking websites.
Very sad statistics show that Asian people got half the response rate black and hispanic do, who also get half the response white caucasian do. (Well, at least, I consider it sad).

So what then?
There was a whole money making market exploiting the despair of men trying to find ways to get to the girl!
-Learn how to talk to her!
-Learn how to seduce her!
-Learn how to pleasure her!
I wish half the promises were true, but canasovas would grow everywhere and make the market ultra competitive.

Does it work?
Well I think everything can be learnt.

Is it ethical?
If anyone cares about that question, raise your hand.

Where's the spontaneity?
Spontaneity is something you can work on.

Is it all there was to say?
No. I'll try to say more about that in a future post.

22 Ways Get The Woman

view presentation (tags: surabaya indonesia softwaredeveloper webdesigner)