There is a discovery process, a little dance, to social interactions that starts with an exchange of trust and goes through to mutual acceptance. The first steps of this dance are the "I know you can trust me, can I trust you?" steps and eventually the dancers get to the "I'm a Good Person, You're a Good Person" or "mutual acceptance" steps. This basic discovery process occurs in every social interaction, whether we know the person we're interacting with or not and regardless of how often we've met the person before. The trust and acceptance steps and those in between are used to establish the rules for further interactions.

It's Quality and Discovery, not Quality versus Quantity

The discovery process moves from what I call "low quality -- high discovery" to "high quality -- low discovery". For example, when two strangers meet, the conversation is fairly mundane; they talk about the weather, traffic, their families. They look for common ground such as school affiliations, shared tastes in music, mov-es, books and sports.

The conversation doesn't have any revealing information, or does it? There's very little of psychological interest being communicated and there's a great deal of emotional interest being communicated. Specifically, our two strangers are exchanging a great deal of "Can I trust you?" "Are you somebody I want to get to know better?" "How open can I be with this person?" information without ever using those words.

This part of the conversation is low quality but high discovery. The topics are low level but the purpose is very high level; to find out if another meeting will occur and to foreshadow what might occur at that meeting.

Social Surrogates

Social interactions also occur between people and people's surrogates. This column, for example, is my surrogate. I doubt I've met each and every one of you reading this column (happy to do so, though), and therefore all you know about me is what you know about me through this column, from the hearsay of others, and from what you glean from my picture above the column (I'm taller and wider than in the column).

This column is how most of you know me and, more important to this discussion, it's my projection of me, or my surrogate, into the world. I send this surrogate out hoping you'll come to trust me (usability-wise). I also hope that you'll recognize that what I write here is important (usability-wise) and that it's important to you (if you're in the usability arena). After that, I want my surrogate to communicate that I can help, and specifically that I can help you. It's at this point in our little dance of social discovery that I want to establish mutual acceptance.

The pattern that I would follow meeting any of you for the first or five-hundredth time is the same pattern my surrogate has to follow each and every time any one of you clicks on the column or prints it out to read it.

1. Establish Trust
2. Establish that the interaction is important
3. Establish that we can help each other via this social interaction
4. Recognize that because we trust each other, have shared something mutually important and both have benefited from it, we can establish mutual acceptance and say to each other, "I'm a good person and so are you!"

Because I'm limited to 1100 words each time I write, I have to make sure this low quality, high discovery dance occurs rapidly every time. I do this through my surrogate by my choice of venue (this column, writing under the iMediaConnection banner, by using the lingua franca of the usability world, the tone of my writing, my choice of picture, ...). My goal is to move quickly from low quality -- high discovery to high quality -- low discovery as quickly as possible. The opening paragraphs tend to be more conversational and share something about me, the later paragraphs tend to be very topic-oriented and instructional. They carry very little information about me. In short, high quality -- low discovery.

My Surrogate Is Not Alone

My surrogate has lots of companions out there. Every website, every electronic brochure, every downloadable whitepaper or marketing pdf -- all are surrogates. Your company's website and marketing materials are sales and marketing's surrogates in the world. It is correctly said that you only have one chance to make a good first impression. The same is true for your surrogate. Your surrogate needs to get from low quality -- high discovery to high quality -- low discovery as quickly and as cleanly as possible. The person sitting across from your surrogate needs to receive the correct social signals in order to experience the trust, acceptance and comfort level necessary to move forward.

One way to think of the discovery process is to think of a funnel (sales professionals sometimes use this concept). The start of the dance, the low quality -- high discovery phase, is the mouth of the funnel. Lots of stuff is getting poured in. The level in the funnel corresponds to where people are in the discovery process. The level's at the top, right near the mouth of the funnel, so people are still in the low quality -- high discovery part of the dance. Now the level begins to drop. There's not a lot more going into the funnel, just lots of stuff coming out. This is the high quality -- low discovery part of the dance. The decisions have been made, the two people accept and trust each other, the deal is going to get done.

The X Funnel

Strangers can't meet for a second time because they're no longer strangers. Their minds have a bias, their beliefs have already been set. In the sense of the sales cycle, the first time someone picks up some collateral or comes to a company's website they are at the widest part of the funnel and are engaging in low quality -- high discovery social interactions. The goal of sales and marketing is to get the first time visitors to the tip of the funnel where high quality (I'm very interested in this, I'm willing to commit to this, etc) and low discovery occurs.

This is the X Funnel. I call it the X Funnel because you can't really be sure what's going in, and you have to know exactly what's coming out. Previous columns have discussed that the first sale is the next page, that the interface is the brand, how to keep visitors returning, how to modify pages so they seem fresh visit after visit while allowing visitors to continually find what they're looking for. All of these discussions have been about funneling visitors through the discovery process. The next column will continue this discussion, how to move visitors through the funnel, by demonstrating the VAM, or Visitor Action Metric.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truckdriver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthropology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychodynamics and psychosocial model-ing - and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Analytics, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Busi-ness Development Network. He's inventor and developer of Evolution Technol-ogy and can be reached at jcarrabis@nextstagevolution.com. Joseph will be speaking at Chicago AD:TECH in July 05 on Persona Mar-keting for Multimodal Consumers. Come on by and introduce yourself.