Last week, I joined Chris Treadaway, founder and CEO of Notice Technologies (the parent company of newly launched Polygraph Media) to Defrag 2011 in Denver. Defrag bills itself as “the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge and accelerate the ‘aha’ moment.” In practical terms, Defrag is all about the challenges and opportunities around Big Data, such as managing it with scale and extracting meaning from it. As Big Data gets ineluctably bigger, surviving the deluge will prove to be one of the great business challenges of our lifetimes.

Defrag is a brainy but manageably-sized conference, affording extensive opportunities to trade notes with technologists, analysts, VCs, entrepreneurs and enterprise business development types. The speaker list gives you a sense of the rarefied air Defrag attendees were breathing in the Mile High City: Brad Feld, Paul Kedrosky, Tim Bray and Roger Ehrenberg are just a few of the folks who sent us away feeling a lot smarter on Thursday than when we were when we arrived on Tuesday.

Chris and I were there to launch Polygraph, whose exhaustive social data mining platform enables brands, marketers, agencies and businesses generally to derive actionable insights from a firehose of consumer data being amassed in social silos like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Chris, the co-author of Amazon best-seller Facebook Marketing An Hour A Day and an unabashed quant, founded Polygraph out of a desire to subject the fluffy claims of social marketing to quantitative analysis as a way to measure success and derive actionable business insights. As we joked this week, we settled on the name Polygraph after our public relations team balked at calling the company “Bullshit Detector.”

Like a lot of startups with booths at Defrag this week, Polygraph is tackling a Big Data problem. As Brad Feld noted on Thursday, machines are feasting daily on terabytes of personal information that humans voluntarily feed them. Of course, social media is a significant channel for that personal information. It occurred to me this morning that one way to think of Facebook is the largest, yet most granular lead generation and qualification platform mankind has ever known. And that’s just one slice of the social opportunity for businesses.

Social networks are far more than an outbound marketing channel for businesses. They’re a mirror as well.  Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are where the market’s most vocal, critical and passionate consumers tell you what’s right and wrong with your product, your customer service, your delivery – hell, your whole business. While these folks may represent less than a percent of your customer base, don’t think of them as outliers; they’re proxies for what the rest of your market thinks. And they can (and do) shape what that other 99% thinks.

That’s ultimately why, despite the skepticism of around the ROI of social marketing, businesses can’t duck social. Yet, once you jump in those conversations, it’s all you can do not to drown the massive tide of feedback that comes your way. Like Big Data as a whole, Social Data is growing on a geometric curve. As Feld noted Thursday afternoon, the human mind is really only wired to understand linearity. It’s hard to fully grasp the implications of a data set that grows by some multiple every day – and as the data grows, so does the taxonomy, birthing an ever-expanding array of categories and subcategories.

Even the basic problems get hard. The comments in a branded YouTube channel can become like an bathroom wall of infinite size, with incidents of profanity, abuse, slurs and slang of dubious goodwill mounting hourly through the stratosphere.

Whose comments should a business take seriously, and how should it tackle moderation with scale? What can be known about these commenters, fans and followers? How can that knowledge be put to profitable but non-creepy use? What’s the best way for a business to converse with (rather than broadcast to) the hundreds of thousands or millions of fans on Facebook fan page?

And how do you know if you’re doing any of this particularly well?

Those are the types of questions I’m working with Chris and Polygraph to answer. We think those answers are immensely valuable to businesses. Just about everyone we spoke with at Defrag felt the same way.

In a sense, Defrag was like a support group for those of us working on these kinds of Big Data problems. While at times ourselves suffering from information overload, Chris and I returned to Austin last night feeling both invigorated and validated.

The other night I was having dinner with a startup founder/CEO and the topic of company cultures came up. The CEO was acknowledging what he perceived as a disconnect between his operating style – top-down, introverted, disciplined, process-oriented, etc. – and that of what we’d seen at innovation-based companies that had enjoyed periods of outsized success (relative to their peers), i.e., places like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Austin's Bazaarvoice, etc.

A quick tour of these places takes you by lounges, ping-pong tables, beer fridges (or kegerators), employees casually chatting over fair organic trade coffee and other signs of apparent extravagance and indolence – that is, in the context of the traditional Protestant work ethic. Of course, anyone who’s ever worked at a small technology or media company since the mid-‘90s will tell you this stuff is table stakes.

At each of these places, the benefits packages are fairly unconventional. I recall Google having on-site yoga, and, as a Bazaarvoice employee, I appreciated the company’s deliberate lack of a vacation policy.  Bazaarvoice CEO Brett Hurt cites that non-policy as the best illustration of his “radical trust” philosophy – hire talented people, trust them to do exemplary work and not abuse the lack of vacation limits. And, of course, most employees needed prompting to even hit two weeks’ vacation time in a year.

Being both undergraduate alums of SEC schools, we found a fascinating parallel in last week’s game of the century college football matchup between Alabama and LSU.

Alabama is coached by notorious taskmaster Nick Saban, an NFL product who has effectively trademarked the term “The Process” as a descriptor of his approach to winning football games. Saban is relentlessly disciplined and a film study obsessive, prone to spouting management book-isms like “excellence is a habit.” Saban has won BCS championships at two different programs – LSU and Alabama. In his second year at Alabama, he had the Crimson Tide playing for an SEC championship. At the end of his third season, the Tide were BCS champions.

On the other side of the field is Les Miles, Saban’s successor at LSU. Miles, it can be confidently said, has a friend in Chaos. EDSBS’ Spencer Hall wrote something to the following effect: Les Miles rides the Les Miles ride because even he doesn’t know how it ends. Miles’ wild endings to close games are legendary and the source of much heartburn among the Tigers’ already hot-blooded Cajun fanbase. But do not doubt Miles’ madness. In his first season, as Louisiana was mired in Hurricane Katrina fallout, Miles led the Tigers to an 11-win season and a division championship. Like Saban, Miles hoisted the crystal football in his third season.

Oh, and there’s this:  freewheeling Miles is 3-2 against process-devoted Saban, including a current two-game winning streak against Saban’s Tide. Granted, that’s a very small baseline of data. But, if you start with the presumption that militaristic discipline should win out more often than not (otherwise, why have a military at all?), you have to be surprised that Miles is anywhere close to .500 in this series.

I’m not drawing any absolute conclusions here, because I can’t. There are a lot of styles to winning. But I do find Les Miles’ phenomenon to validate the management style Jim Collins profiled heavily in Good to Great, that of hiring smart people and getting out of their way. Contrast that with Saban’s notoriously top-down approach – Saban’s assistants are widely (and unfairly) reputed to be his clones.

Like Google or Facebook, LSU has recruited superbly – both players and assistants.  (For that matter, so has Alabama.) And, it’s possible that, like Facebook and Google, Miles has, wittingly or unwittingly, created an environment where those talents are granted autonomy to play and coach the game as they see fit, with Miles only stepping in to handle the key moments of the game, like whether to go for it on 4^th down or how to handle the last two minutes of a close game.

Where I see the strongest parallel between Miles and the companies I mentioned above is that I think Miles, like those companies’ founders, is an optimist, more enthralled by the potential to do something spectacular than deterred by the risk of failure.

I think the best illustration of this from Miles came in the final seconds of the 2007 LSU-Auburn game (scroll to the 8-minute mark in the video below). Trailing Auburn by 1 point with 25 seconds to go, LSU had the ball on the Auburn 23 yard line, facing 3^rd and 7 with one timeout left.

Every coach in America – and most assuredly Nick Saban – would play the percentages and either kick a field goal or run a quick play to get in better field goal position on the final down. Miles, however, was in his moment, percentages be damned. He casually let 12 seconds run off the clock and trots his offense out on the field. They throw a deep pass in the corner of the end zone … and complete it for a touchdown with a second left on the clock. Ballgame.

Pandemonium erupts in Tiger Stadium, which is always prone to such things (see the Earthquake Game from 20 years prior), while confusion reigns in the broadcast booth. With both the game and a division title at stake, why on earth take such stupendous risk? If that receiver (who was blanketed) dropped the pass, hordes of angry Cajuns surely would have burned Miles’ house to the ground.

Quoth Les, when asked by the sideline reporter: “Because we had the opportunity to kick their asses.” At this, I suspect current and soon-to-be billionaire tech CEOs nod their heads appreciatively.

Stay tuned. I'll be filling this space with thoughts on startups and the changes around them.