Or rather it should be.. but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Personality tests, the Meyer’s Briggs type that crawl into your head and reflect back a picture of you have always fascinated me. Sure, they can be stereotyping bullshit but hell, I’m in marketing. And it’s part of my planner duties (when I’m playing that role) to do that very type of “mindreading” of customers, consumers, constituents. Mindset segmentation, perceptual research like this can be can be crude, but needless to say Simmons, Neilson, ethnographics and quant research aren’t quite the perfect neuroscience some of our colleagues seem to presume. So given my interest, an eyebrow raised when seeing typealyzer via adam cohen. Tools like this are useful if not good geekish fun. I also think they are an untapped opportunity for marketers, planners and behavioral technologists.

On a parallel, I’m mildly obsessed – more than mildly- with who and how someone will crack the semantic code of internet (online conversation, behaviors, visuals, metatags, etc) for our purposes. And no my webtastic analytics friends, I’m not talking about persona studies, clicks, user paths, site visits… and the like. Noooo ad people, not quantitative online studies, syndicated research surveys or segmentation. I’m talking big picture, wefeelfine.org-jonathan harris behavioral + emotional context style stuff. Think google-firefox for strategic planners jacked up on department of defense/MIT goodness and ethnographic exploration.

Bottom line, there’s a goldmine of untapped insight in the swarm of the internet that’s waiting to be tapped.

We’re so close to seeing this I can taste it. Social media tracking ala Techrigy, UI breakthroughs similiar to PhotoSynth and algorythm based technology via swarm intelligence. Sure, these are imperfect tools but it’s a sign of things to come.

Think about how such tools could help you and evolve for planning purposes. I spent awhile tinkering with Typerator as a “segmentation tool” using you… my ad planner, tech-geek, innovation, futurist friends as guinea pigs. This is super crude but here’s how you map:

A bit of a tangent that I’ll read into more in Chapter 2 (and let you know who you are ;), but this is one example of a way to derive info both visually and through data driven analysis from the real web behaviors of people. Shouldn’t we have more?. Aren’t they within grasp? Are you thinking about this? And are any of your agencies or CMO’s springing to develop them? Is this on your radar?.

Hmmm.. I’m not so sure with a few exceptions:

- Misentropy builds plannersphere search.

- Noah builds brand tags.

- Y&R builds Brand Bubble BAV tool online.

We all are still pretty entrenched in our existing methods: primary, secondary marketing study, syndicated research, organic search, online survey and behavioral metric analysis. But it would be very interesting to see how some of these tools could be facilitated or recreated with use of online tools that tap into the huge people archive of the web. Think realtime photo-video searches (with photosynth-like UI) of people that are more structured and data driven than surfing flickr. Or social media tracking that’s more left brained and intuitive than ARF-Cymfony or Buzzmetrics online tracking . Complimented by existing crm and secondary research info..

Meta people, REALLY meta. Qual and quant, real time, visually inspiring genius regarding the people we hope to interact with or sell to. Somebody’s gotta crack this soon right? Shouldn’t you be on it before the incubating tech firms steal your thunder? Or even worse.. put you out of business.

I think so, but it’s going to take a couple of things:

1) Management on the marketing, exec level agency, analytics or planning director level that get it. This is a big one but I think there’s a few folks wired to get us there. Exhibit A, Exhibit B and Exhibit C.

2) Marketing Innovation, Account Planning and Experience Design departments that function not only to think and direct but to create insight products. Essentially making thinking and insight process a product like Google Labs would. Again not to automate organic thinking but to speed the process of gathering insights, compliment what we always have done, observe people. These don’t have to be the complex applications of database marketing firms and Oracle. They can be as simple as simple as Twistori or the creative tools already developed by the plannersphere.

3) A stronger push to get planners on the agency side fully immersed into the tools and technology. Might be simple enough to make it more commonplace to blog, twit, etc (a trite example but a start.) And more pointed reqs to “publish” or participate?

Where’s that get us? Thinking ahead. Going back to finding insight in new ways that cut through the cluttered swarm of consumer info around us and ultimately keeping us from getting stung by a technology that was ours for the taking to create.

Somebody do it. Or let’s figure out a way to do it together.