Can You Ever Truly Know Someone?

Rounding the final turn today on my lunchtime walk, I passed two retired neighbors taking in the near-perfect summer day. One was in a lawn chair in the maw of an open garage door at the front of his house. He sat in the shade with his chin on his chest snoozing – I hope. Also reclined in the shade of his front porch enjoying an issue of Popular Mechanics was Chuck, his next-door neighbor. The old coots have the two most immaculate lawns and tastefully meticulous landscaping in the whole neighborhood. They haven’t spoken a word to each other in years, except for the kind of word I can’t print here – and I have printed some doozies.

I watch them occasionally from the shadows of my own garage as they pass one another pushing lawn mowers in opposite directions, each careful not to cross the property line, which they both know down to the centimeter. They’re both in their mid-70s and both could kick my ass.

I try to imagine them being customers of GreatCall, the MVNO from San Diego that serves the 55-and-older crowd with easy-to-use technology designed around health and safety applications. And I think not. I only know one purpose guys like this would find for the cute little Jitterbug phone and that is to tie a note to it and throw it through his neighbor’s picture window. There’s probably one other use they’d find, but we won’t go there. There is just no way these feisty, independent old men would ever admit to needing extra safety features on a big-buttoned phone.

So how would an analytics package capture that profile? How would a contextual marketing company know what tightwads each of them is outside the lavish investment they put into their homes? How could technology capture Chuck’s social network – which was built by word-of-mouth and communicates by people pulling up to the curb when they see him outside to ask if he fixes this kind of widget or that kind of gadget? (Odds are he does.) And if they could capture either, would they dismiss his potential value as a customer or realize how he could be a great “influencer" in that social network if it could get him using and talking about their client’s phone (he loves to talk about how things work and what a great price he gets on things)?

I believe analytics, business intel and contextual marketing will collectively get to the point one day if given the chance where they can know as much about Chuck as they can about the high-volume data user and make a correct determination about his potential customer-value 95 percent of the time. I may never see it, and I am pretty sure Chuck and Lou won’t, but that granddaughter who visits Chuck every once in a while and who could eat off his garage floor if she had to, will see it. In the meantime, the technology will both amaze us and underwhelm us. So if you want to be a pioneer in communications software and are looking to contribute to the future of the industry and other industries as well, this is where the actions going to be. This is where you’re going to want to work. Good luck to you, I say.

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