I’ve set up thousands of alerts over my career as a journalist, entrepreneur, and now marketer. SMS alerts about every new blog post on a long list of company blogs were how I beat everyone to the punch almost 15 years ago and became the first writer hired at TechCrunch. Today I monitor for AI-benchmarked anomalous numbers of mentions in a short period of time of a long list of companies related to the firm I work for, Sprinklr.

(Above: the first Sprinklr Smart Alert hit I ever got was a good one. I took action on it; I amplified some good news and congratulated a business partner on an innovation of theirs I would have missed without this alert.)

I believe Alerts of various types are going to grow all the more important in the coming years – and I think we should talk about our expectations for them.

A lot of people get frustrated when they get a non-actionable alert. That’s the price of a good alert, I believe. Any good alert system will weed out 99.9% of potential events, send the .1% of events it thinks you may want to take action on. But you may only find that 50%, 30%, 10% or less are in fact actionable. Depending on how you’ve trained the system. Any way you do it, there’s more work to be done.

An Alert never tells a whole story, it only suggests where there me be a story to find. I love some alerts that are “false alarms” (non-actionable) the vast majority of times they sound. Because I’m willing to sift through noise to find quiet signals.

Furthermore, alerts are great for delivering news of an anomaly and maybe a little context – but the whole story is going to require manual skilled discovery of context, testing of a thesis, and will require decisions to be made.

That’s because almost no full set of circumstances for everything that could be actionable can be described by mortal humans ahead of time. Any Alert that doesn’t surface Unknown Unknowns is something else, something very narrow.

Below: this is not how or where I work.

I love my job. I get asked every other month what my Employee Satisfaction score is and at last report, it was a 10 out of 10!

I’ve worked at Sprinklr for more than 3 years now and it just keeps getting better. And by that I mean I just keep learning more every day. And we’re making it a better place to work almost every day.

The team I manage has an average score of 9 out of 10, so they’re not as happy as I am yet – but they’re pretty darned happy too.

I’d like to invite you to be a part of our team, if the following job description sounds like a good fit for you. When will I be filling this position? I’m not entirely sure, but soon.

If you’re interested, please email me at Marshall.kirkpatrick@sprinklr.com with the subject line “influencer marketing position.” I expect between 20 and 50 people to email me about it, but we’ll see! I’ll try to respond to everyone personally. I look forward to hearing from and/or meeting you!

Help wanted:

INFLUENCER RELATIONS MANAGER

We’re hiring a smart, communicative, B2B Influencer Relations Manager responsible for the development, execution and measurement of influencer marketing and collaboration campaigns used to drive both customer acquisition through demand generation and sales support, and internal learning from influencers who can contribute knowledge and insights to internal stakeholders throughout the business. This position works with cross-functional teams, especially Content Marketing, Events, and Analyst Relations. The position will be based in either Portland, Oregon or New York, (remote? Maybe…) reporting into the VP, Marketing.

About Sprinklr

Sprinklr’s mission is to enable every organization on the planet to make their customers happier. We do this with the world’s #1 social suite, which helps enterprises deliver memorable customer experiences with an integrated suite of Market Research, Customer Care, Social Media Management, and Social Advertising. Headquartered in New York City with 1,300 employees in 22 offices, Sprinklr works with more than 1,500 of the world’s most valuable brands, including: Allstate, McDonald’s, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nike, Signify, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Santander, SAP, Shell, Verizon, and Visa. Sprinklr’s partners include Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. For more information, visit sprinklr.com or follow us at @sprinklr.

Primary Responsibilities of This Position

Help scale execution of influencer collaboration programs, ranging from weekly video and audio podcasts to influencer collaboration on blog posts, webinars, events, and more

Collaborate closely with VP of Marketing to build effective, smart campaigns, balancing demand generation with long-term relationship building and maintenance, learning, and integrity

Configure and use customer experience software (Sprinklr) to monitor for influencer-derived insights and opportunities

Collaborate with internal teams focused on content generation, advertising, events, and more.

Solve problems and generate business value.

Minimum Qualification

3+ years marketing experience executing marketing programs

Demonstrable intellectual curiosity

A growth mindset

Better-than-average written and verbal communication skills

Could this be you? If so, send me an email! Do you know someone who could be a great fit? Pass this along to them!

Walmart announced today that it will require suppliers of leafy greens to upload data to a private blockchain provided by IBM next year. The goal is to make it much faster to verify origins of greens responsible for food borne illness. That will be good for people who buy spinach at Walmart and for Walmart’s reduced costs in responding to crisis.

There’s sure to be an innovation dividend, too. It’s not hard to imagine this expanding across the biggest supply chain in the world, and then to jump into more firms even beyond the other places it’s currently being tested.

Bloomberg: “IBM is working on food traceability with 10 other companies, including Dole Food Co., Unilever NV and Driscoll’s Inc., a berry supplier. The computer giant holds a leading 32 percent share of the $700 million-plus market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. said in January, and has 1,500 working in the field.”

Let’s see CSR on the blockchain

This sounds like a great start but I sure would like to see the immutable ledger paradigm put into networks like these supply chains and used to track:

• Climate impact

• Worker respect

Just that! Verified by 3rd parties, I’m sure, but with that verification certified by said blockchain.

Help slow down climate apocalypse and use blockchain to prove that your whole team is doing it. I’ll buy more if you do, and I know I’m not alone.

I just finished Atul Gawande’s book Better, on the science of performance improvement, especially in medicine, and it was worth the time it took to read. I might have paid for it; the last book (A Very Brief Introduction to the Future) and the next book (Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality) on my reading list were things I paid for in print.

I’ve previewed and reserved On Grand Strategy though and that’s one I wouldn’t have paid for – it’s too far outside my core interests. I learned something really big from it: the importance of thinking in terms of strategic sequences. That’s something that’s easier said than done but hugely important and much easier to do when you think about it consciously.

Because we all paid taxes to fund the public library, and because ebooks are so easy to quickly check out from home, the diversity of ideas that I’m being exposed to is substantially increased relative to the books I’d be willing and able to buy in hard copy. If that’s true even for me, I can only imagine how true it might be for other people less apt to invest in exposure to diverse perspectives.

I’m thinking about this just after leaving a community swimming pool, where for a few dollars people of all kinds of backgrounds have come to be in the water. It’s far more diverse that my workplace, than the natural foods grocery store I shop at, or the last restaurant I ate at.

Collective creation of free and low-cost resources is a powerful way to expand and enrich people’s experiences and perspectives. If we as a society choose corporate alternatives to these collective institutions, optimized for profit and efficiency instead of for public accessibility, it will be a great loss. Let’s make sure to support and appreciate those public institutions.

Industry-leading analyst Brian Solis published a huge new report today, titled The Digital Change Agent’s Manifesto.

The report starts out with several pages of depressing reading about how hard it is to be a change agent inside an organization. I almost stopped reading it.

But then I continued, and the final 70% of the report is incredibly brave and totally outside of what I expected. It’s a discussion of the emotional barriers change agents face – not just in others, but also in themselves. Then, it offers great advice on how to manage those emotional barriers in yourself and in others.

All of the advice is remarkably good. Here’s just one taste of it.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, to manage detractors, change agents ought to listen closely to their feedback. It is better to let them voice their concerns than to let them detract in secret. By listening to their concerns and the rationale for why they resist specific efforts to transform the organization digitally — and by trying to understand their motivations — change agents can turn detractors into allies. As Patrón Spirits’ Parker shares, “Most vocal critics can become your biggest advocates if you spend time with them.”

The whole report is amazingly helpful, though. You won’t read this kind of insight anywhere else. I highly recommend it.

There are four kinds of social channel communication in a model used by influence marketing superstar Matt Broberg. Matt shared this model in a recent interview on the excellent Influence Marketing Council podcast. I think this is a great model to help guide and deepen our thinking about community, marketing, and communication. Each category of channel has different strengths, weaknesses, and expectations.

Broberg’s four categories are:

• Synchronous communication: real time, back and forth, low overhead, casual channels. Slack is a common example, Twitter another.
• Asynchronous communication: channels where a response isn’t expected immediately, people tend to take a little more time to think about responses, it’s a little more formal. Email, listserves, and forums. Matt talked about Discourse as an increasingly popular example of contemporary forums.
• Knowledge base: Where you share, store and access timeless information. Maybe that’s Google Drive, or an intranet. I have a personal wiki I created for myself that I started using PMWiki and I put lots of notes from things I learn there.
• Discovery of new initiatives and developments: I’m going to call this the newsfeed model. Facebook at Work is a good example. I’d love a newsfeed for all my various platforms, updates from co-workers, my wife, machines, etc. This is a powerful type of communication platform, rich with opportunities!

I love this model and want to spend some time thinking about the various channels of communication I participate in, along these lines. Hope you found it useful too. This has been an update to my blog, a communication channel that’s mostly asynchronous, some part knowledge base. Have a nice day.