The Need for Science in Social

Everyone is a social expert apparently. However like broody cuckoos, even the ‘experts’ are beginning to cast doubt on credibility of new comers into the rag-tag social nest. I like to think of it as the great rush into frontier land: define your boundry, setup shop and establish your shtick. If you’ve a good enough lingo you’ll steal the headstart, and become established as one of the pioneers. This is speed irrelevant of direction partner. No wonder clients are so freaked out. They’ve got a bunch of headless chicken cowboys telling them where to tie up their horses.

Everybody in the industry has to accept the inevitable: the breaking up of the ancient Pangaea. New continents are being formed with unique atmospheres, landscapes and food chains not yet seen before. Darwinian principles will see off the cold-blooded who don’t evolve, and promote the warm-blooded who do. At best we can loosely predict effective strategies, but we owe a lot more to trusted clients than the repackaging of pseudo-intellectual marketing blogs. It’s not only nauseating, it’s mostly bollocks.

On unanimously agreeing that the current ad model is boned, Guided set about the discovery of pathways for future salvation. Inspired by collective intelligence commerce platforms like Mechanical Turk, Zoopa, Crowd Spring et al, we embarked on a mammoth research bender, and in moment of clarity we decided to seek the enlightenment of science.

This is what we unearthed:
Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence
Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher, and Chrysanthos Dellarocas
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
February 2009

249 examples of crowd aggregation have been translated into a simple framework for mapping ones own specific genome, as per the requirements of the challenge:

Who: Hierarchy or the Crowd?
Why: Money, Love, or Glory?
What: Create or Decide?
How: Collection, Collaboration, Group decision or Individual decision.

Some luminaries will have gleefully digested this, but it seems many haven’t. (Not judging by a quick Google trawl anyhow.) To put it simply, anyone considering the conception of a new advertising model based on the requirements for social excellence, ie. wider, deeper and purer skill ranges, should read this paper. This research outlines the recipes of primordial social soup. It breaks down and identifies the metaphorical gene sequences where collective intelligence begins.

We need to trust science. It has no agenda. It is reasoned research by hardworking intellectuals, who incidentally could probably earn far tidier salaries were they to pursue careers in marketing.