Terry White, Chief Innovation Officer, Amway Japan

MM: But underlying that is data. Right? So you’ve got data.

TW: Yes.

MM: How you visualize the data. How you aggregate and visualize it will speak to the individual user-be they the financial analyst or the brand marketer. Right?

TW: But at the end of the day, the most difficult argument that communicators and marketers always face is telling other people in the business about the value that we add.

MM: Right.

TW: That’s why I was getting at the interface and the way that we package things to people. You can have as much data as you like. Unless you’re showing people what it means to them, in the role that they have in the business, it’s useless.

MM: Speak more about what would show up on this dashboard that would depict how we’re adding value to the business.

TW: Let’s limit this to social media space. I think we’ve got to talk about the tone and the volume of the conversation. I think you’ve got to at some stage say there are 8 million people out there and they’re talking about “us and me,” and these are some of the things they’re saying.

I think you’ve got to say that “this is how we’re supporting the conversation”. “This is what we’ve learned”. I think notions like headcounts and hits and blog post numbers are meaningless.

You’ve got to move your thinking to a place where you say to people that “tone and the volume in a particular channel” - let’s say YouTube - “is number x”. And “it’s changed this way in the last month or week or day”. “Our ability to connect with people has changed in this particular way”.

I think if you get into the mechanics and the raw numbers, you lose the ability to make any difference to what’s happening inside your organization. Let’s face it - the actual number doesn’t matter. It’s the delta that counts. It’s the insight that counts. It’s the actionable recommendation that’s going to materially effect your business in one way or another.

MM: There would be a window there that would say, “Here’s what we’re doing relative to Facebook.”

TW: Absolutely. There would be a tab, for example, for Facebook that one would click on.

MM: And when I’d hit the tab, for example… Right now in Facebook, for the most part, you have people. Right?

TW: Correct. There are some companies in there, but… Yes.

MM: Do you anticipate that in the future, brands will have their own Facebook page?

TW: Yes. A brand is as much a personality as Michael Moon is.

MM: Some would argue that. I wasn’t talking about brands, either.

TW: Brands are personalities. In a space like Facebook, what we’re talking about is a collection of personalities. A collection of identities.

MM: Then if you accept the premise that a brand corresponds or correlates to a personality, could you then invoke a framework of personality types?

TW: You could.

MM: That would be the underlying metrics or facets that you’d measure against these particular things. “My brand right now in Facebook corresponds to this particular personality type.”

TW: If we say that brands have identities and brands are conversations and brands are emotionally responsive and all of these things, then the easiest way or the easiest metaphor to draw for that — I think — would be a personality.

MM: Are there any particular personality profilings or psychometric models that you like as you’ve researched this?

TW: I’m not far enough down the track to say which particular models I’m being attracted to. I think you could use any one of them. As long as the language that you were using to describe it in your dashboard was understood by the people who were interacting with that dashboard, then I think that would be valid.

It’s about the interface. Why is Wii so successful? From a technology perspective, it runs a poor third to the other two platforms.

MM: This is Nintendo Wii?

TW: Nintendo Wii. Yes. Why is iPod so successful when there are many other MP3 players that technologically are much better?

MM: Fortunately or unfortunately, I have personal experience and anecdotes that go to why those two things succeeded. In the case of Wii, the designer back in Japan — I forget his name… a Japanese fellow-basically, when they developed the Wii console, he anticipated downloading lots of games over the net at night.

In particular, he wanted to go for a very low-power CPU. I think it’s the [ARM] chip. Whereas Sony and Xbox were chasing Moore’s Law with the IBM cell processor or the super… I can’t remember what’s in the Xbox, but I’m sure it’s an Intel chip.

TW: It’s the Cube chip, I think.

MM: Yes. Nintendo went to a low-power, low-performance chip. That meant they could not be driving anywhere near the high-resolution graphics or the polygons and the pixels that the Xbox or Sony Playstation 3 was driving.

TW: Sure.

MM: Instead, they shifted the value — the entertainment value — out of the box to the social interaction among players, with their joystick. Right?

TW: Yes.

MM: The top of my head blew off when I saw grandmothers playing tennis with granddaughters over the web.

TW: Correct.

MM: I said, “Oh, my God. That changes everything.” They figured out a way of bringing social — and I would say with the other half of the family… the women… now part of the game-playing space, as a function. They didn’t need the CPUs. They just needed the controller by which to control the various actors online.

TW: Yes. That’s the point I was getting at. The brilliance of the Wii, the brilliance of the iPod. The brilliance of the telephone is that the interface that sits there. The Wii interface that human beings interact with turns all of the technology into magic.

MM: Yes.

TW: Arthur C Clarke said that technology is perfect once it turns into magic. So, yes. When I picked up this telephone and dialed you and I put in a 14-digit number to get to your particular extension, I didn’t think about the cables and the switches and the satellites and everything else that was being used to do it. I can dial somewhere anywhere in the world by inputting a certain string of digits.

The interface is what is brilliant. The Wii — when you play tennis, you hit the ball like you would hit a tennis ball. You hit the golf ball like you would swing a club. And that’s the point I’m trying to make about analytics.

MM: Before we go there-a friend of mine-Bill Volk-now down at MyNuMo was the CTO at Activision. He did a brilliant presentation at the computer game-developer conference years ago. He had one declaration that was the core of his presentation.

“The interface is the game — the game is the interface.”

TW: Absolutely.

MM: There was no distinction between game play and the interface.

TW: Absolutely correct. I wish I’d known about that before. It took me 49 years to understand that it was the interface that was the most important thing. That’s the problem with our analytics.

I can talk to you about the elegant mathematics that sit behind the impressioned count rate that I ported out to our workers in Japan, and how I aggregate print, TV and web all from a single impression base. It’s a wonderful statistical model. But it doesn’t mean anything. The interface is wrong.

In the dashboard that I’m talking about and in that whole analytics engine, I have to present that in a way that makes sense to people. So if they glance at it, they understand what’s happening.

MM: You’re really talking about two things, here, Terry. First of all, you’re saying that there’s a disconnect between feedback and strategy. I’m seeing this. They want to change. People are complaining about this. But there’s a disconnect between that perception-that “aha” or that insight-and how then to execute a change using that input.

TW: Yes. So there’s a disconnect in terms of translating data into insight, and insight into strategic realignment or strategic execution.

TW: At least an actionable recommendation. Yes.

MM: Yes. The second thing that’s probably to that is this. To what degree do you really need to be an analytic wonk to infer meaning from the data?

TW: To very little degree.

MM: I.e… “Is it believable?”

TW: As long as you can demonstrate the veracity of the datasource and you can present it to people in a way that they understand it, then you have got the meaning across. You’ve been a great communicator.

MM: I don’t think that’s so, though.

TW: Why?

MM: It’s a little bit like when my friends were getting their pilots licenses. As I was watching my friends, they would pick me up with their instructors and such. It was fascinating to see at what point the student pilot trusted the instruments as opposed to his line of sight and inner ear.

TW: Absolutely. The same is true for marketers. They shouldn’t get a license until they trust the instruments. It’s not the data that matters. You know I’m a data freak. But data doesn’t matter. It’s the delta on the data that matters. It’s the change.