Ben Kunz

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“Personalization Is Not As Exciting As Many Once Believed”

January 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Personalization, not a great thing for a democracy, was always for me one of the least-interesting aspects of Web 1.0. I don’t want to learn what I already know but what’s unfamiliar. 

Netflix abandoned its drive to improve personalization for a couple of reasons: 1) Streaming made it less of a priority since a customer could easily switch from unpleasing programming, and 2) Perhaps some others agree with me about desiring novelty instead of familiarity. From Ben Kunz at ThoughtGadgets:

“The deeper issue is that personalization is not as exciting as many once believed. In the 1990s, Don Peppers built a consulting business on the concept of “1to1 marketing,” where new computer systems would learn individual preferences and businesses would respond with customized offers. Don’s concept was that personalization would create an unbreakable competitive advantage — because once a consumer trained a company to anticipate her needs, she would be reluctant to go through the same process with a competitor. Don was observant enough to note that such customization wouldn’t be a fit for every business model — but companies that had customers with a wide range of needs (such as Netflix movie watchers) or a wide range in value (say, financial advisors courting investors) would benefit by deploying 1to1 personalization.

Despite the noble dream of giving customers more utility and companies more brand loyalty, personalization never took off. Amazon was really the best case study … but it struggles still to offer truly relevant personal recommendations on its website (the core challenges being it cannot easily recognize multiple users on the same Amazon account, or differentiate between your modality as you shop for your spouse one day and yourself the next). Twitter has a personalization engine behind its “Discovery” tab to push news or links to you based on your observed Twitter profile. That site section has so little utility, most Twitter users don’t use it. And Facebook, which arguably has the greatest trove of data on human personal interests, is really at the mercy of the advertisers who wish to target you; this is why you, guys, get ads for men’s underwear whether you really want them or not.

Why is personalization so difficult? Why is it so hard to anticipate what people want, and use that for business advantage? The challenge is personalization is at odds with a core driver of consumer purchase behavior — novelty. Consumers are constantly hungry for something new, something improved, something that will stimulate their endorphins in a manner unseen before.”

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“Human Networks, Like Words In English, Have Long Tails Of Diminishing Usage”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends." (Image by Gilberto Santa Rosa.)

Can we, in this wired and connected age, have privacy as well as intimacy? Are we to break free from the shackles of Zuckerberg and allow the rise of networks that afford us more control of our lives? Or will we obediently create the content for channels that others program? From Ben Kunz’s new Businessweek article about the rise of “unsocial” networks:

“For nearly a decade, marketers have been agog over the promise of social networks to provide free advertising, a cascade of word-of-mouth in which consumers act as advocates for a brand or product. The dream is based in part on Robert Metcalfe’s law—the concept by the inventor of the Ethernet that in any networked system, value grows exponentially as more users join. Like the old 1970s shampoo commercial, you tell a customer about your product, and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on, until the world is knocking on your hair-products door. Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends.

Trouble is, Metcalfe was wrong, at least with human networks. In a landmark 2006 column in IEEE Spectrum, researchers Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly showed mathematically that networks have a fundamental flaw if all nodes are not created equal. The authors pointed primarily to Zipf’s law, a concept by 1930s linguist George Zipf that in any system of resources, there exists declining value for each subsequent item. In the English language, we use the word ‘the’ in 7 percent of all utterances, followed by ‘of’ for 3.5 percent of words, with trailing usage of terms ending somewhere around the noun ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ On Facebook, your connections work the same way from your spouse to best friend to boss to that old girlfriend who now lives in Iceland.

Human networks, like words in English, have long tails of diminishing usage.”

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“And so on and so on and so on…”:

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