Crystal helps you communicate effectively with different personality types

Link to article

quote:

---

WHEN MY EDITOR Joe told me to write this story, I knew with algorithmic certainty how to respond: “Done. Absolutely. It’s taken care of.”

I got this advice from Crystal, a site that promises to help you understand how best to talk to any particular person. All you have to do is pick the subject. Crystal will then slurp up public data from around the web, run it through “proprietary personality detection technology,” and spit out a detailed report on that person’s preferred style of communicating. It’s one part oppo research, one part algorithmic astrology. It’s definitely creepy, perhaps useful, and almost certainly a look at how we’ll communicate in the future.

---

Basically, if someone has a high online presence with his real identity, this website can gather data about that person's communication style and make suggestions on how you should communicate with him. If you know certain people well enough to contribute data about their communication style, you can do that, too. You can add an extension to Gmail that looks up your e-mail recipient and gives you an aggregated "personality profile" based on what could be found online about that person. I think the company should look into Outlook integration and not just gmail.

The service seems to be invite-only right now, but it did not take long to get an invite after I requested one -- I signed up late at night, and the invite arrived early the next morning.

Just for fun, I searched for myself, and here were the results:

quote:

---

When you looked up [Name]’s personality profile, Crystal looked through all of the answers provided directly by people who know them, as well as thousands of publicly available online data sources to find information written by or about [Name]. Crystal then runs a personality detection analysis on the text to match with one of 64 different personality types within a few seconds.

The “accuracy confidence" index above indicates 1) how much relevant data was found for [Name] and 2) how much of it was able to be used to determine personality.

The insights below are recommended strategies for communicating with someone that has [Name]’s specific personality type, based on several widely-accepted personality assessments, like the Five-Factor Inventory, DiSC, and True Colors.

Crystal is not intended to provide a 100% perfect personality reading, but can provide useful insights to improve communication with anyone that has an online presence.

---

It was pretty spot-on for me, with only a few exceptions. For example, I don't mind informal tone or sarcasm in the right context, even in a professional environment, as long as it's not a forced, transparent attempt to "relate" to me (though sarcasm in a work email is probably not a good idea). There's enough broad information that it could very well be the Barnum effect at work here (i.e., vague enough descriptions that can be applied to a wide range of people, like the way horoscopes are written). It claims to pull content from "thousands" of sources, but it seems to rely a lot on LinkedIn. That's the most likely place you'll find readily accessible public info about someone anyway.

I just thought this service was particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, most of my job is about effective communication internally and externally with a wide variety of personalities -- as a result, I find e-mail to often be the least efficient form of communication with people I don't know. Too much time spent trying to find that balance between short/vague and detailed/overly long, or direct/terse/harsh vs. soft/indirect/toady. Secondly, it's another service profiting from your publicly available online presence, although it seems to be attempting to do something potentially useful with it.

There is a free version and a couple of paid versions. The free version seems sufficient enough for me. Lets you look up anyone and get their personality profile, unlimited searches and access. But for $25/month, you can also get real-time corrections when writing emails to people, as well as example email templates. For $49/month, it adds "relationship predictions and personalized recommendations" and "Team and organization analysis," which I guess could give you a rough idea of how well two people might work together. I would say the service is probably too young to be charging that much even for a business that's heavy into communication/sales.

It's not exactly difficult to search someone's online presence and get a general grasp of who they are in a professional setting. Crystal, if accurate, does it more efficiently, though. I looked up several colleagues. Most were very accurate, but there were a few it could not find, and a couple of them could be identified by name and company but Crystal did not have enough data to generate a profile like mine above. CEOs and other higher-profile people are much easier to find. Particularly, it seems to have trouble matching photos with names. For me, it uses a pic of some woman I've never met, and there doesn't seem to be any straightforward way to correct it. The rest of my info is correct (and appears to have been pulled from my LinkedIn profile, so it's odd that it wouldn't just grab my photo as well).

Here's a link if you want to sign up and see what kind of profile it generates for yourself or people you know: LINK