Havard Business School has an interesting study titled Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network?. I would like to get my hands on the raw data (which is from the Korean social site Cyworld), but the outline conclusions seems plausible:

• Highly connected people are negatively influenced by purchases in their network. This is consistent with a hypothesis that they are trend leaders who are always looking for new things to differentiate themselves from their group.
• Moderately connected people are positively influenced by purchases in their network. This is consistent with a hypothesis that these people are trying to "keep up with the Joneses".
• Weakly connected people (48% of the data set) are not influenced by purchases in their network. The paper rather offhandedly dismisses these people as "the low status group".

The financial crisis is all my fault. Or so David Smith from our friends REvolution seems to suggest in his post Physicists, models, and the credit crisis:

I remember working in The City in the late 90's and Wall Street in the early 00's and remarking then that just about every quant had a physics or engineering background. I met very few statisticians. Quantitative models have taken a hefty share of the blame for the credit crisis, but I wonder whether the blame lies more in their application, rather than the models themselves. Statisticians are trained on the limitations of models, and how to detect when models are breaking down, but statisticians were woefully underrepresented amongst quants. Do physicists and engineers get similar training?

I was a physicist who left the CERN research facility to work as a quant in an investment bank in the days before “banker” became a four-letter word, so I do have an opinion on this. I firmly believe that no statistician should ever be allowed out in the wild unsupervised, and this gives me an opportunity to also comment on the current crisis: We have the luxury to be angry with the bankers. I do not want to take that luxury away from us: it is wonderful that we can afford to indulge ourselves. But I would like to remind us that is is a luxury that we can afford, and that we can afford it at least in part due to those bankers.

All too often marketing departments thinks that database analysis is the first, last, and only step in segmenting the base of existing customers. In fact, identifying clusters of common behaviors is only the first activity you should undertake in creating a customer base segmentation.

In this article we identify the five steps you need to follow for success. We also discuss when you can cut short the five step process.

Marc Andreessen, who as founder of Netscape and other companies knows a thing or two about the subject, has a nice little series on The Truth About Venture Capitalists, part 1, part 2, and part 3. We've said something similar before, but Marc puts it very well.

McKinsey writes about Better Strategy Through Organizational Design and come out strongly in favor of Enterprise Social Software and collaboration techniques:

[T]he new element that can help 21st-century corporations create more wealth is large-scale collaboration, across the entire enterprise, enabled by digital technology. ... Digital technology provides the means not just to promote efficient, effective, and large-scale collaboration but also to measure each person’s “assists” and thus motivate employees to collaborate in ways that were not possible in the past.

Their arguments are closely linked to the profits per employee measure we introduced back in October last year. This is the most important metric for the CEO to manage.

I am in Las Vegas for the Unica user conference where we are considering the future of marketing (and how Unica can help you spend a lot of money, naturally). Darcy Bevelacqua from Harte Hanks had a neat line. As a consultant, she gets called in to help companies to define their direct marketing (and customer relationship) approach and to implement it. Her first question is Do you have a customer strategy?, and the answer is almost inevitable yes.

She then goes to Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service and seperately asks the question: Who is your best qustomer?

If she doesn't get the same answer, then she knows you do not have a customer strategy, not matter what your corporate slide-ware says.

She never gets the same answer.

The Post-GUI era. I like the expression and I think what it tries to encapsulate is important.

I am back from O’Reilly’s 2007 Emerging Technologies conference. The recurring theme of the conference, at least to my mind, was this: as technology becomes ubiquitous we need to think much harder about how technology interfaces with humans.

The world already has an interface, and it isn’t a GUI. We should learn from that.

We don't normally post just links, but sometimes it is just too hard to keep up with the good stuff. Mike writes from South Africal about lessons learned from social software implementations, and Centopeia (almost as difficult a name as CYBAEA!) comments on Lee's presentation at LIFT.

You are not nearly as influential as you think you are. One of my friends are doing research on influencers in mobile networks, and he is going to be crushed (or maybe not) by this entry in a recent HBR list which basically says that influentials are not very ... influential. That is to say that the spread of new ideas in a social network is not dependent on a few super-connected, highly influential members, contrary to popular assumptions. The article offers some specific strategies for marketeers:

Because the ultimate impact of any individual—highly influential or not—depends on decisions made by people one, two, or more steps away from her or him, word-of-mouth marketing strategies shouldn’t focus on finding supposed influentials. Rather, marketing dollars might better be directed toward helping large numbers of ordinary people—possibly with Web-based social networking tools—to reach and influence others just like them.

Since it is Sunday I guess we can link to a nice little time-waster that you may already have seen. If you are a Trivial Pursuit fan, read on.