What Market Researchers could learn from eavesdropping on R2D2
From the post:
Scott asks: in the context of research and insight, why should we care about what the Machine Learning community is doing?
For those not familiar with Machine Learning, it is a scientific discipline related to artificial intelligence. But it is more concerned with the science of teaching machines to solve useful problems as opposed to trying to get machines to replicate human behavior. If you were to put it in Star Wars terms, a Machine Learning expert would be more focused on building the short, bleeping useful R2D2 than the shiny, linguistically gifted but clumsy C3P0—a machine that is useful and efficient as opposed to a machine that replicates behaviors and mannerisms of humans.
There are many techniques and approaches that marketing insights consultants could borrow from the Machine Learning community. The community is made up of a larger group of researchers and scientists as well as those concerned with market research, and their focus is improving algorithms that can be applied across a wide variety of scientific, technology, business, and engineering problems. And so it is a wonderful source of inspiration for approaches that can be adapted to our own industry.
Since topic mappers aren’t large enough to be the objects of study (yet), I thought this piece on how marketers view the machine learning community might be instructive.
Successful topic mappers will straddle semantic communities and to do that, they need to be adept at what I would call “semantic cross-overs.”
Semantic cross-overs are those people and written pieces that give you a view that over arches two or more communities. Almost always written more from one point of view than another, but enough of both to give you ideas that may spark in both camps.
Remember, crossing over between two communities isn’t your view of the cross-over, but that of members of the respective communities. In other words, your topic map between them may seem very clever to you, but unless it is clever to members of those communities, we call it: No Sale!