Circles and Ladders with Google+ Contact Classification Paradigm

Grouping contacts is an impossible feat isn't it? We have to add Bob to Sport, Work, Musician, 'Allowed to Call after 10pm' and all those other groups we never keep up to date.

Like all user supplied up-front people classification systems Google+ Circles can quite quickly turn into hierarchy ladders when you manage your contacts using them, especially in a social context. 

Contact grouping, grading and intimacy-scoring questions arise like : "Why am I not in your Personal folder?" "Why am I only in Acquaintances?", "Why am I not in group X?"

It makes for unhappiness not to mention all the manual labour of managing those connections. 

The flat monism of classifying all your people as simply 'friends' and allowing the system (not you) to speculatively match between profiles managed by the identity owner is elegant. It causes less arguments over status and how other people classify you. 

Baboons would be relieved to have such a thing. 

Flat'ish, loosely coupled metadata overlaps between people such as : attended same school, favourite band is x, graduated in Kent, holiday in France, has photo of Mt Everest provide a more resilient model in the end for both programmatic and humanistic reasons. It also a more natural petri-dish for harmonious social groups when developing new services.

The degree to which this metadata is enhanced as you interact with 'your people' defines the living breathing classification of what they mean or meant to you. It allows for relationship management (manual and auto) between the people you already know and it also allows for the emergence of machine dialogue such as 'People You Should Know'

It's dynamic and weighted through use - it's no longer the leaden categories of 'Work', 'Home', and 'France'.

Touchpoints (manual and automated) between sCRM and CRM

Dear Readers,

I'd be grateful for insights and comments on this topic.

There seem to be two phases to harmonising sCRM and CRM domains.

1. Don't integrate using software - use people initially.

Use the CRM tools in the cloud (FB comments, Twitter, Get Satisfaction etc) where the customer/prospect is operating and backfill insights and information manually into your CRM system.

This is low risk with no internal technology investment. The cost is mostly around people/staff. It's good education all round and a reminder that a companies systems are no longer the ones sitting on their premises.

2. Automated integration of sCRM data/insights into the 'master' back end CRM and related systems.

This of course is much more difficult. Some outlines of touchpoints and suggested automation are below :

Identity : At it's most simplest you can integrate web2.0 Id's of customers into your back end CRM profile and perhaps use your Campaign Management in your CRM app to deliver/chat with the web2.0 channels. Automated campaign management tools spamming customers web2.0 spaces is clearly dangerous as the personal touch may be lost so simply using your CRM tool as a front end to web2.0 activity might retain the personal touch and allow your CSA's to remain in a single workspace.

Profiling : A unified view of web2.0 profiles with internal CRM profiles. Very useful but prone to legal restrictions. Again the CRM system can pull in public preferences/likes/dislikes for customers and use them for customer support and behavioural targetting solutions.

Analytics : merge analytics observations on your own web/IP properties with those in the cloud. This area is nascent at the present time but the integration between Salesforce and Radian6 certainly looks interesting in examining click throughs from the cloud.

Metadata, Taxonomy and KMS: This is a tough nut to crack and the sharp end of the semantic web. Ideally the taxonomy that your customers develop online should inform your southbound knowledge management and product descriptions. Behavioural Targetting ,SEO/SEM and Customer Support will be more successful if you can develop a commonality between how you describe your domain vs how it's actually being talked about in the real world.

Connect Listening with the Raising of Work/Suggestion Tickets distributed to the rest of the business : Use the listening platform data to directly feed into how you raise suggestions, complaints or issues into the business. This avoids some retype and paraphrasing but still requires staff to manage.

Run Listening Platforms Across internal channels such as Wikis and Forums : this could be automated to filter hot topics and prioritise work and many forum providers are moving into the semantic space to enable just that.

Involvement in Design : beyond providing a Wiki or a Facebook group and harvesting opinions on features via Listening Platforms how do we get customers deeply involved in the creation of the products and services we design?

The big question...
Is deep automated integration an expensiveand proprietary folly between sCRM and CRM at the present time?

Do we end raising projects titled 'Integrate with the Internet'?

Photosynth and how the 'collective image memory' is harversted

We're building a collective digital memory with all those:

• votes and ratings
• comments and blogs
• tags and bookmarks

We can put this data on google maps, and provide strong links between place and time as well as invent applications that use this data to create new environments. We don't even need to use the common map metaphor to see our data with IBM's wonderful tool 'Many Eyes' which allows us to analyse data in interactive graphs and visualistions. Data can be processed by simple XML allowing for automated feeds of information and graphic representation such as the example below:




And then there is some next level image-onomy or whatever new paradigm term we need to invent that Photosynth ushers in. A technology acquired by Microsoft and originally developed by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

It allows a feed of photos to build up a map of the earth and places not just using flyover images by aeroplanes or satellite data but by using our own photographs and even illustrations. Photosynth uses public images and it doesn't matter whether these photos are taken by a £10 disposable camera or a posh SLR - it can stitch them together and produce a never ending tapestry that allows you to move around geographic areas and locations with ease.

With Photosynth you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

Zooming in might have you moving through 10 photos using your own as a starting point. Your landscape shot of the fair ex-mining town of Cowdenbeath on your digital camera might be part of a family of 1000 photos of Cowdenbeath. Using this pool of images like stones in the middle of a pond you can step and zoom in deeper and deeper to find the Forth Road Bridge in detail when it was just a red spec on your own photo.

Photosynth takes data from everyone - from the collective memory of what the world looks like. A model emerges of the entire earth as our own photos get tagged with other peoples metadata and the mesh of linking becomes tighter and stronger. The network effect continually enriches the space and easily provides cross user and cross model experiences and information.

This is the real semantic web or 'Web3.0' along with the Social Graph developing through the use of people networks. These inferences are taking a life of their own and one can only wonder at what Web5.0 might be.

There's a great demo hosted by TED where Blaise runs through the application with jaw dropping effect.

Photosynth modestly state "Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space."

This experience is on the web to try right now but be warned Mac fans - this web experience is PC only for now.