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Free Biz Idea – profile people via their online content

Epic Profilephoto © 2009 Jac Culler | more info (via: Wylio)I recently thought of an online profiling service for sales people and business development people.  To use the service, a client enters the FaceBook Profile URL/Name/Email/Twitter/Blog Account/LinkedIn profile of a sales prospect into the service.  The service then spiders that person’s user-generated online content and draw psychological profiles based on word choice, photo to word density, passive vs active sentence use, number of adverbs per sentence, sentence length, and so on.

Once the service finished gathering the data the client would proceed with their sales and development duties as normal, while taking notes and measuring their success so the service could create and refine the algorithm.  Do people who write in the passive voice decide faster than those who write in the active voice?  If you post a lot of photos do you reject everything at first, but then comply with further requests?  Do people who have long LinkedIn profiles like new products, or an established products?

The service would aggregate the data to draw useful information, and I’m sure people would object on privacy grounds, but this service would improve the sales profiling and qualification process.  After all, user-generated content was generated by the user, so there must be some useful data to be gathered from it.

Thoughts anyone?  I might work this idea into Stronico at some point, but not in the next year or more.  I would use this service now if I could.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Free Ideas / Future Features— No comments
15
Nov 10

Written By Steve French

 

Semantic improvements for news coverage that should be in the html 5 spec

With all of the recent political news stories I thought it would be useful to filter out the wheat from the chaff, and what better way to do that than by introducing new tags to refine the semantics of the news?   Surely these are as important as H1, Strong and EM tags for news stories.

I propose that all news stories use the following tags:

  • Factual
  • Conceptual
  • Expert Prediction
  • Expert Speculation
  • Implicit Prediction
  • ImplicitAnalysis

For example, the following paragraph

The unemployment rate hit 9.3 last month as factories laid off 40,000 workers.   This news is expected to hurt incumbents in the mid term elections.   Economist Rollo Tomasi of the University of North Dakota predicted that unemployment would stabilize at 9.4% before falling to 7.2 next year.  He also said that weak seasonal demand is to blame for the slump.

There is only one bit of real news (defined as an event)  in the above paragraph, namely that factories laid off 40,000 workers last month.  Here is how the story would actually look if it were properly marked up with the new tags

<conceptual>The unemployment rate hit 9.3 last month</conceptual> <factual>as factories laid off 40,000 workers</factual>.   <ImplicitPrediction><ImplicitAnalysis>This news is expected to hurt incumbents in the mid term elections.</ImplicitAnalysis></ImplicitPrediction>   <ExpertPrediction>Economist Rollo Tomasi of the University of North Dakota predicted that unemployment would stabilize at 9.4% before falling to 7.2 next year.</ExpertPrediction>  <ExpertSpeculation>He also said that weak seasonal demand is to blame for the slump.</ExpertSpeculation>

With these tags we could filter out all of the non-news (predictions, speculations, analysis) or fine tune the level of detail to our heart’s desire.

What tags have I missed?  Thoughts anyone?  Please leave feedback in the comments below.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Free Ideas / Future Features / Future Media / History & Theory— 2 comments
03
Nov 10

Written By Steve French

 

Another Stronico marketing idea – for phase II anyway

While reading this Seth Godin post about the iPad release I was struck by how great an idea this was

Give the tribe a badge. The cool thing about marketing the iPad is that it’s a visible symbol, a uniform. If you have one in the office on Monday, you were announcing your membership. And if it says, “sent from my iPad” on the bottom of your emails…

Since Stronico is intended to a be a tool for elite salespeople, why not give them a physical token to reinforce that eliteness, say a challenge coin of some kind.  That would dovetail nicely with upcoming secret society marketing ideas as well.

Since I’m going to the Startup Atlanta Meetup tonight, I think that will be it for the blogging today.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Future Features / Marketing— No comments
07
Apr 10

Written By Steve French

 

New feature ideas for Stronico – display edition

I just had two random display ideas for Stronico, and I thought I would share them here:

  1. All contact display photos and icons would initially be in black and white, and as more detail got filled out for that person, the color would gradually return.  One possible problem with this idea is a contact having only a black and white photo.
  2. The size of the contact photo or icon would be proportional to their importance in the network, either by number of connections, number of unique connections, etc.

These features certainly won’t be going into the current version, but I thought I would record them publicly for feedback.  Thoughts anyone?

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Future Features— No comments
23
Mar 10

Written By Steve French

 

Global microbrands, free stuff, and a new idea

gettin' lathed
Last night I read Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid.com on Global MicroBrands.  Today I had the thought that I need to establish a non-denominational reference site for social network theory to support Stronico, as well as to help push the theoretical edges of the web application.  Then I remembered that I was going to do some turning on the new lathe tonight.

Then I had the thoughts: Continue reading →

Future Features / Stronico— No comments
11
Feb 10

Written By Steve French

 

New feature ideas for Stronico

I recently had these thoughts and I’m documenting them for version 2 of the Stronico application.

  1. Psychological profiling of contacts.  I’m thinking of a simple Type A, Type B snap judgment one can make after first meeting a person.  If I can think of working in the Myers-Briggs personality types that would be wonderful, but I don’t think the information is there to implement it practically.
  2. A matchmaker feature – if two contacts have similar tags, friends, interests, life statuses, locations etc, but are not known to know each other, it would be a great thing to introduce them (as written about in the great book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi.  I realize that Facebook has a similar feature, but this would make the decisions based on information that only you, the Stronico user would know.
  3. Archetyping – this is related to point 1, but it would be useful information to store impressions about someone, i.e. is that person a drama queen, unflappable robot (much like the author…), sports fanatic, sensitive artist, and the like.  These would not be that accurate, but it could come in handy, particularly for those people with large networks.  The use of broad archetyping is useful as a sorting mechanism.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Future Features / Stronico— No comments
28
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 




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