Jina Park:

Jina is a junior at Northwestern University studying Economics and Psychology. She will be an intern at Syndio Social for the spring. She is from Los Angeles, California, and enjoys warm weather, listening to music, and eating candy. Jina will support existing client engagements and will help us develop our newest, top-secret offering.

Jai Broome:

Jai is a junior studying economics at Northwestern University. He is interning at Syndio through NU’s Chicago Field Studies program. On campus, he is the Public Relations chair of Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators and Co-president of the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club. Off campus, he is a public radio nerd, video game fanatic (when he has time), and secretly wants to be an astrophysicist. Jai will help the Syndio team increase our capabilities for social network data collection.

You can find Willem on twitter, his handle is @wpieterson, so you can follow his exploits and link up with him in LA

I may be more open to risk than your average person. In my third year of running my own business, I’ve dabbled in the working world with music and film. Call me adventurous, or maybe I’m just addicted to not having health insurance. Still, my experiences in these spaces have made me realize how often we build up success and career myths that keep us from doing what we really love to do.

First: the great myth of the music superstar.  The doe-eyed singer meets a record store exec in a bar, sings him a song, and two weeks later she’s on tour with Lady Gaga.  Or the band that Quentin Tarantino hears in a clothing store in Japan who becomes an overnight jap-pop sensation in the United States.  These stories happened, but the mystique makes us believe that success in the music industry comes from a bolt of platinum lighting.

In college, I watched several of my friends make it in the music industry.  They had varying degrees of success, but three or four of them are now major label artists on international artists. Each of my friends had a lightning bolt moment he likes to talk about, something cool that makes jaws drop.  One friend had 30 seconds to rap for Kanye, and four years later he’s on the cover of one of the biggest hip-hop magazines in the world.  There was luck, but there were also the sleepless nights, unpaid bills, skipped classes and thick skin that made the lightning make a difference. Without the hundreds of hours my friend spent writing rhymes, he never could’ve impressed Kanye in those 30 seconds.  Without working tirelessly to get in-store placement, the 5, 6,7,8′s never would’ve been discovered by Tarantino.  Without willpower and hard life decisions, these stories never would have been stories.

So why do we still believe in the musician myth?  It’s sexy, easy to share and inspiring, but it runs deeper.  It’s a whole lot easier to blame things on something that doesn’t happen than on yourself.  Myths are justifications for not putting in the hard work needed to be truly great at something.  The crazy thing is that many of the musicians I know who haven’t made it yet are more talented than the ones who have, yet they are still waiting for something to happen to them when they could be making opportunities on their own.

There is a similar myth surrounding entrepreneurship.  People love to praise the entrepreneur who takes an idea from a garage to the Fortune 500.  While business icons like Steve Jobs and, more recently, Mark Zuckerberg, personify this story, people forget that building a successful business is more about sound reasoning and building a talented team than coming up with a brilliant idea.  In fact, many of the most successful businesses have taken existing ideas and improved upon them in ways that made their product uniquely valuable, such as Facebook, Honda or Netflix.

Over the past few years, many people have approached me with ideas that they wanted to build into businesses.  While many of the ideas have been really powerful and potentially huge, only a handful have built companies.  The biggest difference between entrepreneurs who build something and people with ideas is belief in the myth.  Entrepreneurs dive in head first, refine their ideas and start building.  Because of their hard work, they gain the experience and create the opportunities that make their idea something great.  People with ideas get stymied by the impossibility of myth.  They worry about not having experience, not having investment and not being ready.  The myth obscures the fact that at some point, every entrepreneur faced these challenges and overcame because they worked so hard to learn on the fly.  Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur, but so many people with ideas do have the ability to build great businesses.  Sadly, too many of these people get distracted by the myth to make their idea come to life.

The worst part about the myth is that it hurts the rest of us.  We may never hear some of the best musicians of our time because they are still waiting for their moment.  We may never benefit from brilliant innovations that could’ve made our lives better.  Ultimately, we are all held back because so many people see success as something that happens to you as opposed to something you do.

By Zachary Johnson

This summer, the Syndio Social team is going to need more help than ever before.  With loads of new project work, software development and new marketing initiatives, we are going to need candidates with a variety of skills and background experience.

If you’re interested in working at a start-up, doing meaningful work where you will make an impact, or being a part of the Syndio family, then this might be the summer internship for you.

Currently, we are looking for candidates with experience in the following areas:

Sales & Client Research

Syndio Social is looking for an undergrad junior or senior to join our team to help us conduct research on prospective and current clients.  Work will center around preparing client briefs for Syndio Staff, and will require considerable skill at finding, organizing, and presenting critical client data in preparation for client calls and proposals.

Skills needed:

-Past research experience

-Familiarity with sources like Hoovers, Gartner, Forrester, HBR and other business journals and press

-Strong organizational skills

-Strong written and oral skills

 Social media and digital marketing client work

Over the past year, Syndio has worked with Vanberg & DeWulf (www.belgianexperts.com) to help guide and maximize a comprehensive digital marketing campaign.  V&D is the oldest importer of Belgian Beer to the US, and we will continue to work with them through 2012.

We are looking for a new team member to provide support on this account.  Skills needed:

-Strong written & oral communication skills

-Familiarity with all major and most minor social media services & tools (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, hootsuite, sprout social, etc)

-An interest in start-ups

Analysts

At any moment we are working on several projects that require extensive social network data collection and analysis. We are looking to train an intern to help us in the data collection, disambiguation and analysis components of these projects.  Work will be hands-on and under supervision from one of our analysts.  This type of work is unique, and a stepping stone to full-time employment at Syndio.

This person must have the following:

-Considerable experience with Microsoft Excel

-A strong background in math, statistics and other analytical courses

-Strong writing abilities

-An interest in start-ups

If you are interested in any of the above positions, please contact us at info@syndiosocial.com

The next few months, however, are going to be even more exciting.  We will release our new software, expand our team and release cases studies highlighting our work from 2011.  This has the potential to be a big inflection point for the business, and we want to keep you updated as it happens. Keep an eye on our blog for more information on these new updates, as well as job postings, information on social network analysis and more thought pieces.

As the name of the summit suggests, many believe that the key to this solution is to better teach principles of entrepreneurship across the American population. The solution proposed has two key components:

1. Educate people, especially youth, on how to turn ideas into businesses
2. Educate and enable current entrepreneurs so they can grow better businesses

There are a number of organizations that exist to help solve these problems. The NetworkforTeachingEntrepreneurship(NTFE), for example, exists to educate high school age students about building businesses, and foundations such as StartupAmerica assist early-stage start-ups. A critical focus for these organizations is providing mentorship. Mentors, who have themselves been successful entrepreneurs, are critical to help guide young founders to success. While many people volunteer through these organizations and assist new companies, there is still a challenge to link the entrepreneur to necessary knowledge resources.

In order to increase the chances of success for entrepreneurs in America, we need to figure out how to best pass knowledge down from potential mentors. There are currently a few systems that seek to do just this, such as incubators, entrepreneur communities, student groups, non-profits and angel communities. The challenge with these communities, however, is that they are often small and serve niche communities. Furthermore, they are often difficult to break into. How can we make this knowledge more accessible to people who know they want to start a business, but don’t know how to get more involved?

One possible way to tackle this challenge is to think of it as a network problem, where we need to better connect existing entrepreneurs to aspiring founders. This could be thought of as a relationship recommendation challenge, where we match a number of variables and use it to recommend a relationship.

For example, the following criteria could be used to match: business type, knowledge needed, geography, ethnicity, time willing to dedicate and other passions. With all of this information, it would be possible to best pair up potential mentors for cities and areas that need more entrepreneurial support. In this scenario, both young entrepreneurs and mentors win; for young founders they get great advice that helps them avoid mistakes and build better businesses, for mentors they get the opportunity for personal fulfillment, potential advisor compensation and are introduced to early opportunities for investment.

So how would we organize such a system? This could be a job for local chambers of commerce or some other governmental group, however, it will probably need to first start amongst entrepreneurs themselves. If entrepreneurs who learn from mentors would in turn become mentors and share their knowledge a self-sustaining network could grow. While technical infrastructure could help to do this more effectively, it will still be up to the individual to join in this cycle.

Look out for part II of this blog post next week, in which we discuss the different types of mentors that entrepreneurs can rely upon.

The Empact100 list recognizes the top 100 companies run by young entrepreneurs age 30 or younger who impact the economy and inspire others to join the movement to revitalize the economy by starting a business of their own. The Empact100 is organized by Empact, the Kauffman Foundation, Opportunity International, the Startup America Partnership, and a number of other partners.

To learn about our new product and how you can use it to improve your business, please visit our Services page.

Although Syndio Social will continue to provide a range of applied social network analysis solutions, our newest offering focuses on tracking and accelerating organizational change.

Please let us know what you think of the new site and our new tool.

Sincerely,

The Syndio Social team

For those not familiar with the Call of Duty (CoD) franchise, it is one of the highest grossing franchises of all time, with over 30 million players battling it out online this year alone (1).  Every time a new CoD game comes out, it is a massive event that makes truckloads of money almost instantly.  When CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was released, it earned over 550 million dollars in revenue within 5 days (2).

This time, however, it is not only the newest CoD game, Modern Warfare 3, that is getting CoD fans excited.  In conjunction with the game, Activision is releasing both premium and free versions of Call of Duty XP, the new online gaming community that ties into the CoD game series.  Call of Duty XP provides players with anywhere access to statistics and analysis on their gameplay, the ability to compete online for prizes, professionally refereed games, and most interestingly a social network built into the game itself.  It is this last piece that obviously peaked our interest.

The CoD XP social network integrates with Facebook and Twitter, like other game programs, and does so across multiple platforms, from the console to computer to mobile device.  This network exists to provide CoD players with the ultimate social experience.  It will link them up with players with similar interests, allow friends to find other players they know (who they didn’t know played CoD) through Facebook and Twitter, and make it easy for these folks to participate in the gaming environment whether they are on or off their console.

At the first Call of Duty XP expo, Activision released information on many new game play elements, including the new CoD social network.  Immersive social networks tied to games or activities are by no means new, however, when XP launches it may very well be one of the largest in the world.

As social network nerds, we are particularly interested in how CoD XP can draw upon their wealth of social network data to improve gameplay.  Specifically, this data could be used to increase player involvement and improve retention.

First, CoD could use smart recommendation systems to maximize the player gameplay experience. Not unlike Facebook, XP could use social network and player data to provide players with suggestions on who to play with and certain player communities to join.  Algorithms combining player performance statistics with friend of friend data could route players to the games and teams that are the best match for them.  For example, when a player logs on and searches for a game, XP could recommend a list of games that are optimized for for any or all of the following:

1) Player skill level- the algorithm compares kills to death, time playing the game, accuracy and other factors to make the game more accessible for new players

2) Improvement Match- this would take XP data on each player and match them with players who provide good foils for improvement, i.e. if a player has a trouble with close quarters combat, it puts them on close quarters maps with equally ranked players who are better at close quarters combat so to focus on improving this players skill in this area

3) Friend of friends- this recommendation uses social network analysis to find friends of friends and pair them on the same team in random games, that way it increases the likelihood of a player making more friends online.  Special icons can designate friends of friends so that they know who they should work with on a level

Currently, the in-game interface for CoD allows players to create their own games, invite friends, or join random games either alone or with friends.  By adding recommended games to the mix, it gets players to become further involved in their gameplay, whether looking for a challenging, trying to improve their skills or looking to meet new people.  This is particularly valuable because the more friends a player has in a game, the more difficult it is for him or her to put down the controller.  This is a lesson learned from Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) like Everquest and Word of Warcraft, which force players to make strong friendships with each other.  First person shooter (FPS) players do make friends online with one another, but they are typically easier to leave the game and come back again.  By introducing a friend-finding recommendation system (and integrating that with XPs plugins to Facebook and Twitter) it becomes possible to introduce that same peer pressure to play that makes MMORPGs so engrossing.

Beyond recommendation systems, player data analysis and social network analysis can help to understand the gameplay factors to keep players engrossed or force them to leave.  By tracking a multitude of variables, including but not limited to time played, who people play with, the levels they tend to logout early from and the gameplay settings of games that people leave often.  By tracking this information, it is possible to see if there are any factors that cause players to leave the game in disproportionately high amounts.  This is valuable information because these features can be tweaked in patches to provide a better and more engrossing game play experience.  From a social perspective, this information can be used to increase the intelligence of the recommendation system so that players get recommended to play with people who are likely to keep them in the game.  Couple this with data from Facebook connect (which will be used with XP), and the options for monitoring and improving retention become virtually limitless.

With CoD Modern Warfare 3 coming out this November, it will be exciting to see if any of these data analysis features are integrated in the gameplay experience.  The possibilities for improving gameplay with existing data are high, and the franchise stands to only gain by exploiting these new features during development

The service channel, or communication medium, that is used to communicate with a client is a critical factor in the customer communication process. Choosing which channels to use in which situation is challenging, especially as technology and customer demands drive expectations for near instantaneous communication across multiple channels. In order to adapt, businesses must think strategically about building a portfolio of customer communication channels designed to best serve your clients.

As we explained in a previous Syndio blog post, the effectiveness of the communication process strongly depends on the deployment of the proper medium (in terms of its richness) for the proper task. In reality, the issue is far more complex. Syndio Social recently completed two reports for the European Commission in this domain. The first is a comparison of the multi-channel service strategies of twelve public employment organizations in Europe for the European Commission. The second is a broader analysis of (e-)government service strategies. These reports provide valuable insights in the factors that play a role when improving customer contact processes.

The key lesson from this analysis is that multi-channel management is not so much a matter of introducing new media, such as social media, or deploying certain channels for certain services, but a change management issue that deeply impacts the entire structure and culture of the organization internally, as well as externally towards its clients. The challenge is to communicate with the right client regarding the right subject via the right channel at the right moment. This not only requires a profound understanding of the various client segments’ needs and behaviors, but also a flexible organization with a client-oriented, highly skilled workforce. This makes multi-channel management at its core a change management issue for large organizations. From our work with the European Commission, we saw that successful organizations in the governmental domain demonstrate an understanding that change has to happen across the entire organization in order for it to be both properly executed and sustained.

Keep an eye out for both European Commission reports, we will be posting them on our website by the end of the week.