About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Social serendipity in real-time

willie-nelson

Searching through case studies from Sony’s social summit earlier this year (only now do I have the time to read them!) I came across a nice deck on how Sony Music Entertainment promoted a song by Willie Nelson and Snoop Dog, to their respective fans.

And particularly liked the fact that ‘influencer promotion’ was key to success, along with timeliness of the launch and campaign novelty, not to mention the #thinslicing fact that “better tracking analytics would have lead to more intuitive data on users”.

However, as I have recently been talking with Chris Arnold at Awedience about the potential of his product I was drawn to the phrase “Real-time key influencer engagement” as a factor in the campaign.

So I did a search in Google.co.uk with that term and on the first page an article on The Power of Influencer Marketing and Social Media stood out as both recent (Sept 2012) and ’cause it contained all the relevant keywords – influencer and real-time.

And what do you know, when I clicked on the link the piece by SeanClark is about the power of Chris’s real time influencer marketing product. Not to mention the fact that the process of discovery was a nice example of serendipity too.

 

Thinslicing joke, otherwise lost to the world

Phew, just found my  joke I contributed to the xs4all Science Jokes site wayback in March 2001. Now it looks like a joke about #thinslicing, in part because it includes concepts borrowed from my travels – heterogeneous organisation of data – comes from talking to a group of computer scientists at a First Tuesday meeting in 2000:

Q: How do you find a needle in a haystack?

Scientist says: One draws up a research and development proposal for a new
and improved device, costing $100m in budget and just under $200m on final
completion. The device can harvest for needles in any given haystack in any
terrain at any time, and operated by remote or even hands-on control.

Chaotician says: Faced with such a heterogeneous organisation of data you
assemble a bunch of friends (say ten or less, or maybe more if there is free
alcohol) and hold a party on the haystack. Someone will be bound to find the
needle by stepping or sitting on it. Or if they don’t something much more
strange + interesting will appear, so that the needle is classified as a
variant hay-straw. And the new discovery classified as the strange attractor.