schaunwheeler

Why should we assume that the way SMS, phones, mail, notifications and other channels have been handled in the past is the way they must always be handled? I work with a lot of those marketers. It's not like they're sitting in front of Braze in a black top-hat, twirling a curly mustache with their fingers, and saying "heh heh heh, how I can annoy all of my users today?" They hate that there isn't a better way to reach people. There are better ways - I know because I'm building one of them and can see how it reaches people when they want, about what they want, and as frequently as they want, and how the engagement and purchase rates are way higher for those individualized messages than they are for dumb blast messages.

It's not inevitable that a tool with a glaring technical flaw must always have that technical flaw. Technical flaws can be fixed.

It feels like you're assuming a traditional marketing approach to "blasting" messages and hoping they stick. That's how most marketing tools work, but it's not how all marketing tools work, and I think it's a mistake to treat an implementation flaw as an indicator that a technology isn't actually desirable. It's not desirable in its current form. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

It's in people's nature to take sides, and, as you pointed out, technology serves whomever happens to control it. So people who control technology should use it to try to help other people. I realize it doesn't often work out that way, but I see no reason to give up on the ideal. In the end, it's in the interest of those who control the technology to make the end-users happy. If everyone actually turned off all push notifications, companies that send push notifications would have a useless channel. It's not in their interest to spam people, and from personal experiences I can say that I think most of them know that. The tool set for sending smart notifications has just been incredibly limiting until recently.

Lot of strong feelings here about push notifications :) I think it's worth pointing out that (1) there are many people out there who find push notifications useful or even desirable, and (2) push notifications don't need to suck. Most push notification are annoying nudges because tools that allow companies to send notifications only allow mindless mass blasts with maybe a bit of only-slightly-less-mindless segmentation scattered in. There are better ways to do it. I'm helping build one of those ways (aampe.com), but my point is that we should distinguish between the current state of the technology and the potential of the technology to meet a valid need.

Let's take the bike company example. There are three main ways you could vary our outreach to potential customers: time, topic, and text.

Just think about timing: when is the best time for someone to get a message from you? There are aggregate stats about certain days or time being better for open rates, but customers aren't a monolithic entity. Some times work for some customers, and other times work for others. We've found that timing decisions have huge impact on ROI in industries ranging from gaming to retail to food delivery.

Now look at topic: what kind of bike do you try to interest them in? Do you try to interest them in a bike at all, or do you pitch a helmet, or shorts, or repair services. Personalizing topic is the essence of a recommender system, which has been discussed elsewhere in this thread, and it's possible to get something like that, even for a bike shop.

Then you have text: let's just look at value proposition. Do you appeal to their love of the open road? Their desire to exercise and get more fit? Spend time with their families? Replace an old bike that's causing them maintenance headaches? By learning what aspect of biking individual people care about, you can tailor subsequent communication to emphasize those things.

A bike company has virtually endless ways to tailor their message.

This article is a combination of a straw-man argument and a bad analogy. The authors say [personalization] = [3rd-party data categories] * [appeals to non-universal emotional associations]. They show that 3rd-party data categories are crap. Anyone who has worked with those sources knows about the bad quality, so the criticism is an easy sell. Then they use an analogy of Disney/Pixar movies to argue that messages should have universal appeal. Most everyone feels all the feels when they watch a Disney/Pixar movie, so this is also an easy sell.

Pull the straw-man apart a little bit: 3rd-party data isn't the only data out there. There's at least one solutions (full-disclosure: I'm building it) that uses high-frequency communication channels like push notifications as a factory to originate 1st-party data that's tailored to your business needs and exists at the individual level. In other words, saying personalization based on 3rd-party data doesn't work is like saying a car that with water in the gas tank doesn't work. Of course it doesn't. Stop putting water in the gas tank.

Now look closer at the analogy: like a good movie, a good marketing strategy will expose customers to a wide variety of reasons to engage, so they can take what is personally meaningful to them and leave the rest. You can't fit the whole strategy into a single message. Of course you can't, just as Disney/Pixar can't fit every emotional association into a single scene scene. The authors point out the obvious fact that personalization can't fully happen at any single point in time, and miss the point that personalization necessarily happens progressively over multiple points in time.

I don't mean to come down hard on the authors of this post. They're reacting to what most marketing platforms call personalization. The problem isn't that personalization is impossible and doesn't work. The problem is that so many platforms have implemented something that doesn't work and have called it personalization.

For anyone interested, my co-founders and I have written several blog posts covering both what real personalization should look like, and many of the technical aspects of how it can be both possible and effective: www.aampe.com/blog

I wrote this specifically for data science jobs but I think it translates reasonably well into any technical role:

https://towardsdatascience.com/data-science-career-advice-to...

The short answer is that it all depends on what you are looking for in a position.

The longer answer is ask them what they do (as a company, team, etc.), then ask them what infrastructure (technical and organizational) they have in place to do that. Then ask them about non-managerial growth paths (unless you're a manager).

Finally, ask them to give you a question - some business problem they're trying to solve - that they themselves don't know the answer to. Ask to sit in a room with the people who would be involved in planning a solution to that problem, and actually plan out the initial steps of solving it. That will tell you more about the team dynamics and the workplace environment than any explicit questions you might ask.

Here are some ideas:

https://hackernoon.com/can-we-be-honest-about-ethics-ecf5840...

https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about...

https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-...

I've tried to flesh out some of the discussion of systemic risk here:

https://hackernoon.com/can-we-be-honest-about-ethics-ecf5840...

I'm not questioning the documents' merits, or the intentions of those who wrote them. I'm concerned about the downside potential they introduce through systemic risk.

Thanks! I filled out the survey.

A few things:

1. I never claimed the MVP was just whipped together. I claimed it was an MVP. I'm aware that this has been worked on for months - I joined the Slack channel and tried to participate. You made a straw-man argument.

2. The piece of my mine you linked to was never posted in the D4D slack. Or in any other community discussion. At least not by me. You resorted to an ad hominem attack on me personally instead of a principled attack on my position.

3. You stress the fact of this being a living document as if that had something to do with my concerns. Living or not, it went into production without fully considering the downstream harm the product could cause. You avoided my actual argument with a red herring instead of engaging it.

Given all of the above, why should I accept that your invitation to participate in the data.world slack was extended in good faith?

If anything in my original post seemed to warrant the hostility of your response, then I beg your pardon for poor wording. But my argument still stands.