The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

In a nutshell, Mr. Kestenbaum made assumptions about others in a software engineered social network and those assumptions were not shared by the others in that software engineered social network. I think this is an important example of something I described in the Online Identity arc.

And, my god, if they're true about NPR listeners, can you just imagine how true they must be for NPR's online commentators?

The error here is actually pretty common - assuming a shared concept of one thing equals a shared concept of all things. This is similar to the Equality and Identity conundrum; Equality and Identity are not the same thing. To say all men are created equal is not to say they are recognized as being equal. Don't confuse the "what" with the "who". To say equality equals identity is to say that all men are one man, and the actions of one man are the responsibility of all men.

This error, though, can lead to a misplaced trust (think Hostage Syndrome over the internet). They like the kind of music I do so they must be just like me. Not!

They listen to NPR and to the same shows I do, so they must be just like me. Not! (trust me on this one. I've taken part in some NPR fundraisers. Not all NPR listeners are the same)

And this, of course, feeds into our arc on noisy data and designing new metrics because just as the reason I'm sitting here typing isn't the reason you're doing it, the reason I listen to NPR isn't the same reason you do (it can be, doesn't have to be) and just because I listen to the same music you do doesn't mean we like the same food or drive the same car (despite what marketers want to think).

Noisy data is, to me, like junk DNA. We use to think there was a lot of DNA that was meaningless, just taking up space in the helix. Then we found out there is no junk, all of it has meaning, you just have to know what it means.

Noisy data is very much like that and plays a crucial role in microtargeting and market segmentation. We'll be concluding the noisy data arc over this coming weekend. Stay tuned...

Links for this post:

• Hostage Syndrome Links:
  • Negotiating with Terrorists: The Hostage Case
  • Terrorism as an Academic Subject after 9/11: Searching the Internet Reveals a Stockholm Syndrome Trend
• Noisy Data posts:
  • Standards and Noisy Data, Part 1
  • Standards and Noisy Data, Part 2
• NPRish links:
  • NPR
  • Morning Edition
  • How iMet My Neighbor on iTunes
• Online Identity arc
• Online Trust arc