Performance Controller

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results"...WC Print

Google power links bank crisis impact using “User Reaction Litmus”

When reading the article “Google reveals lost confidence in banks” in Director-Of-Finance Online you quickly see the power of using Google search engines information to gauge and understand the pulse of consumer behavior.

If you are a big brother watching adversary you may be concerned, but the fact is Google now knows with some certainty what we are all thinking.  How you may well ask?  Simple, they keep all the history of what we search and have developed tools to analyze it.

Yes every URL search is kept; including who made it, where, and when it came from; what is searched for and the search trail, are all kept. With this information they simple do intelligent search patterns analysis to see behavior changes using their linked analytics tools to see what is on our minds.

The value then is deploying it to organisations for their marker research. That in turn allows Google to sell things like their simple Pay-Per-Click advertising to grow their now massive advertising business, that has made them the rich company they are today.

Linked analytics to provide ability to track events and build consumer profiles is not new, But the velocity and quality of timing is. So much so it is now a phenomenon that is changing the very substance of our lives and commerce. Google now have the power to get instant feedback on all our thinking patterns and changes in them, before we even begin to show up in street and act on our research.

Knowing what people plan to do before they do it, means there is a financial killing being made regardless of financial crisis. Well organized alert marketing thinkers who are equally deft to react to changes in consumer behavior patterns are now moving in on this capably.  This new breed of entrepreneur is using linked analytics as their tool to clean up. Today if you searched “Personal safes” you will find 281,000 entries. From there you can b=narrow it and research your potential purchases while comparing vendors product information for free and without even talking to a vendor until you are ready to trust them. But now with the information so organized and quickly available they can know you are shopping and can plan accordingly. Incidentally talking about the present financial crisis according to the dofonline article “Searches for home safes are also up 150% over October 2007, with searches for safe savings are up 900%.”

So let’s examine some basics. A norm in ordered markets is “safe-branded-habit-form-buying” programs to drive buyer behaviors. Routine, life-style, entertainment, choice, peer pressure, curiosity, boredom, to name a few are all drivers in that paradigm. But when a shift occurs in the fundamentals that cause even the routine to become a paradox, then all these drivers go out the window. What replaces them generally is a market that becomes driven by panic, fear uncertainly and of course opportunity, each with its own for set of behaviors that in turn trigger solution and other reactive types of survival behaviour buying.

For the most part when people are under threat, after the immediate escape to preserve the status-quo, is then to protecting the money as the most critical refuge point to safeguard it at all costs And many unfortunately do just that. Hence the abnormal lift in buying inquires for personal safes is obvious even to blind Freddy, as people not lose confidence in spending their money on assets of no certain value and then lose faith in the institutions that house the money itself .

So using intelligent linked analysis of changes in URL activity is at the heart of understanding how people react and think. Being able to simply analyse URL activity is now a massively powerful market research tool. I guess the URL could be aptly named from its current technical derivative “Unique Resource Locator” to “User Reaction Litmus”

This makes me very excited about the future, as we can learn quickly to rectify issues, even fundamental ones, like world economies, that now have all 6.8 million of us joined at the hip.

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Much has been written about the 100th Monkey syndrome and for me it was something that was taught in business Management Schools and Universities in the 70s when I was taking my doses of learning.

We often refer to this in our business which is by nature in the leading edge of ongoing technology and process innovation centered around continuing best practice and group behaviour. So for the record I thought it worthy to re-publishing it in this forum with due deference to the author and the Japanese study team that discovered it.

This is an much republished excerpt from the book by Ken Keyes, jr. “The Hundredth Monkey.”

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant.

An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too.

This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes — the exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. Let’s further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.

THEN IT HAPPENED! By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But notice: A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea…Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes. Thus, when a certain critical number achieves awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

Although the exact number may vary, this Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the conscious property of these people

Always food for thought, so I hope we get some debate and ideas coming back.

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