“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”
– Robin Williams
Hopefully, all of you have a fond memory of an English teacher who taught you the joy of great literature. For me, it was Mrs. Moore. She asked us to read Paradise Lost by Milton, it was and still is one of my favorite books. My mind was blown, it was such a profound story and sparked an interest in language that has never left me. The phrasing, structure, and choice of words were really fascinating to me. For those of you who don’t remember it’s an epic poem about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Not that I expect anyone would want to read this again, however, if you’d like a copy, I’d be happy to send one to you.
As I read the poem, my mind was processing the language on many different levels. I was following the storylines, making connections between the characters and language, experiencing the emotional intent, and following a cadence of the poem, all of which helped me make sense of the story. We all do this when we read a book, see a movie, or watch a YouTube video. When you experience content, your mind follows a process of understanding the language, which is how you make sense of what is being shared with you. Most of this processing happens unconsciously. There is another great book call the “Secret Life of Pronouns”, Frank Taylor recommended this book to me. It explains how the use of pronouns belies your mental framework and underlying thinking on a subject. If you’d like a copy of this book, let me know.
I’ve been sharing my enthusiasm for Linguistic AI and MarkLogic for a while because I believe those two technologies in combination will allow us to turn content into a data source. This will be the third pillar in advanced personalization technologies. If we are able to take Profile data (Data about people) Analytical data (Data about behavior) and use content as an additional data source, we can then plumb all of those data points into a machine learning system that would define the right experience for each person or segment.
I need everyone in Tahzoo to start thinking about content in five dimensions;
You naturally do this anytime you listen to someone. There is an area of research call NLP Neuro-Linguistic Programing. Neuro refers to your neurology; Linguistic refers to language; programming refers to how that neural language functions. In other words, learning NLP is like learning the language of your own mind. We are applying the learnings of NLP to create richer data models so that we can create an experience that feels right.
By combining the three data pillars, we will be able to use Artificial intelligence to structure an organize experiences for the consumers. The system will be able to take into consideration, your context, your intent, and most importantly how you interact with content toward a specific objective. This will be a major paradigm shift in the way marketing and personalization are conducted today. Most personalization solutions are grounded in an e-commerce paradigm, where the marketer sets up a series of A/B testing experiments that try to identify what most consumers are responsive too. This leads to a wide variety of problems, starting with the tyranny of the majority, where because the red button is selected 52% of the time everyone gets the red button, never mind the fact that 48% of the customer like the blue button. When these models are applied to content or the sequencing of content it is very difficult to avoid content silo-ing where you create a reinforcing selection of the same content.
What people are really looking for is a solution that understands the context and expectation of your experience and then delivers this efficiently. The reason that content and language is that it is the basis of understanding and brand building. When you feel understood and you share a common language with your customer it strengthens their brand affinity and increases the likelihood that they will take action. We have a long way to go in modeling out human to human interaction patterns in a digital context but Haystack Tahzoo’s product for transforming content into actionable data sets is a huge step forward.
Let’s go be great!
Brad