The possible business benefits of social networks

I have to admit I have been slow to find value in social networks and social media, particularly in a business context. Sure, I've tried Facebook, but I closed the account after I decided I simply did not care enough about the comings and goings, minute-by-minute activities and phone-enabled orgy of idiotic imagery (for example, the image here shows a foul baseball that landed just under the front passenger side of my car, hit by my 11 year old last night at the little league playoffs (they won, BTW) -- without my iPhone, this magical memory would be lost forever) of people I had not seen in person in years, and frankly have little in common with anymore.

Same for Twitter -- I have enough frequent, brief thoughts of my own to organize and evaluate I don't need them crowded out by the pithy musings of others, nor am I needy enough to really believe I am doing a disservice to humanity at large and hindering the advancement of intellectual discourse by not instantly sharing my every thought. That's what blogs are for, which are only slightly better in that they allow for the all-too-often unused capability to produce multiple drafts.

Now, LinkedIn I do use frequently, but less for interaction with others and more for research. And the more features they add, the less interesting it becomes to me as it just creates more visual noise.

Which leads me to the enterprise.  While many people are keen on the benefits of social media within business, I have been much less so.  Businesses exist to produce goods and services for less than the market will bear.  Social networks are distracting, and combined with other distracting technologies like email and phones, it seems to be more counter productive than not.

But here's the thing, whether I like it of not. Social media and networks can be fun and engaging. And if people engage, they contribute.

This has been the classic challenge in knowledge management. Just because you install software to enable a "Community of Practice" does not mean people will contribute. And those who do may not be the ones you really need, as the people who are really good at their jobs are generally busy doing their jobs, and have little time for anything else.

Another approach has been to hide rewards within a system to encourage users to explore it, but that tends to encourage the people who like to find things and get rewarded, and have the time on their hands to do so.  Which, again, are most likely not the people who excel at revenue producing activities.

Social media may be different.

Social media, if woven into the work flow and processes, could bridge the gap so that knowledge capture is thorough, useful and painless. But it will need to be guided and managed to truly be successful.

The big lie in search

The biggest lie in search is also its most touted benefit -- that it is intuitive and easy to use.

Perhaps, as much as a blank piece of paper is intuitive, so too can be a single, empty text box partnered with a single submit button.

But the search results page? Easy and intuitive, it never has been, and it is getting worse and worse as search companies keep adding more options, suggestions, clusters, facets and widgets to try and help you make sense of the endless pages of results. Even the Google with its once pristine layout recently felt compelled to add more clutter to the interface, an explicit acknowledgement that the results they serve up simply are not good enough.

So how could the search experience be improved?

One way is to make the results better by asking just a little more of the searcher up front. If you are able to ask the right questions, you can infer much. For example, if, instead of a single submit button, suppose there were three; "animal," "vegetable," and "mineral." By forcing the user to select, huge amounts of ambiguous results could be eliminated. Of course, this approach impacts the simple, intuitive search box and button combo myth, but if the experience and results are better, does it really matter?

Another approach is to build applications and interfaces that integrate rules to constrain search queries to a specific business purpose or process. To quote from a patent currently pending (um, mine):

"This invention relates generally to software-based search technology, and particularly to rules-based (rules being any standardized set of principles or methods for organizing and structuring information (e.g. The AP Style Manual; IDEF, a business process language; the Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing) searching via a constrained or guided query structure."

 You can read the full patent here should you be interested.

Bottom line -- attributing the property of "intuitive" to a text box forces a free-for-all environment that must cast too far and too wide, and demands far too much processing on the backend in the attempt to guess at user intent.  Constraining the queries, either by empowering the user or by integrating them into the user experience, can more easily deliver better, more relevant information.

Fun and games with disambiguation

One of the coolest things I have learned in the last few years is the notion of disambiguation, a linguist's term for determining the right meaning of a word within a specific context. My current favorite example to illustrate this is:

This is important, as not knowing which meaning of “manhattan" is being referenced, whether in a search query or in piece of content, can really impact how well algorithms can leverage words. While my interests are currently focused on automated query building, certainly there are many, many interesting things that can be done when proper word definitions are known. Here's an example from our experimental search engine, howdoya.com on how to mix a manhattan. Note all the useful words on the left you can use to refine your query -- disambiguation! Now, if you want to see something really interesting, click on the x-ray glasses next to each search result -- again, disambiguation! A world of possibilities.

Would you pay for great search results?

In our experiments at Emantix with automating search queries, we discovered something really curious -- the longer and richer the query, more often than not the top result was very, very good. But the following results were not -- at all.  In fact, in our experimental search engine, howdoya.com, we had to tune down the richness of the query so that, at a glance, the entire results page looked good, giving the user an overall perception of quality.  And of course, when we tested with organically occurring ads, the same was true. Really great queries -- fewer, if any, ads, mediocre queries -- more ads.

So the question is, do more relevant search results diminish the quantity and quality of ads displayed? And if so, what are the implications of and opportunities in removing the obligations inherent in a paid advertising revenue model?

Why not an ad-free, fee-based search engine?  A low annual fee that is painless to an individual, but collectively, on a web-scale, could be a highly profitable enterprise?

Would you pay a nominal fee for better results and less visual clutter?

I would like to propose a word, a verb, to describe this opportunity  -- to "craigslist" -- or to disrupt an entire industry by eliminating a critical source of revenue.