DARPA shows you how to find social media snake oil salesmen (and balloons)
Over the last week, two things happened that suggest that many organizations are heading into the social media hype cycle to “you lied. it didnt work” (jobs may be on the line – at a minimum consulting jobs), while others are moving beyond the dip to effectively harness social media.
Businessweek echoed a challenge to some of the most visible consultants in social media such as @chrisbrogran and @garyvee from others active in the space, who have differing views on how businesses can harness social media (I think @armano would prefer social business). The concern is that, unless something changes and we show results, we will find ourselves in the “you lied. it didn’t work” phase.
Sorting those that can get results from those that cannot, is not easy. But there are huge differences between those who know and those who claim to know as demonstrated last week in DARPA’s Network Challenge.
DARPA asked people to find 10 balloons across the United States and a team from MIT’s media lab, won. As @mirzu put the solution so eloquently:
In fact most of the 4,300 participants used some combination of social media tools. Some people simply monitored twitter (we observed this throughout the day of the contest). Others enabled people to submit locations on a google map using APIs. Others set up Facebook groups. Still others had an iPhone app. In fact many of the strategies seem to mirror the types of work being sold to organizations as “social media”.
Many participants in this contest would probably refer to themselves as social media experts, but many could not verify the location of even one balloon – there were only 900 submissions of which many were spurious.
So what lessons can organizations learn from the DARPA contest for spotting Snake Oil salesmen?
focus on outcomes - many people can use tools, but few can use them to achieve specific outcomes, so focus projects that can achieve specific business goals versus simply using tools.
test and measure – you should be able to measure some outcomes that impact the business. DARPA was still going to learn if someone found 5 balloons and not all 10. But it would enable them to compare the results of different approaches.
small experiments are fine – DARPA is not likely to deploy MITs strategy in Afganistan next week, but it is likely that they will try this out again with more money and resources to see how it works for more realistic/useful problems.
Most important, beyond ballons, DARPA shows you how to spot spot Snake Oil salesmen. And you dont need to put too much as risk. We’ll be out of the hype cycle dip over the next few years. Please be patient.
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2 Comments to “DARPA shows you how to find social media snake oil salesmen (and balloons)”
I heard the contest was part of an internal report: “Problems caused by the internet during Civil war”… Had you heard something like this before?
really not sure what the specific motivation was. seems like there was quite a bit of interference so there may well have been some desire to see how rebust social networks might prove in the face of interference for solving specific problems.