What can social media show about politics?

It can show that the professional press does not reflect public opinion.

Attentio is measuring and monitoring the buzz around the European Union and its pet policies and problems. Analysis of the project demonstrates the distance the EU has gone to earn popular legitimacy–as well as the distance the EU has yet to go.

Mainstream news is an accurate source of what the EU is up to. The EU elite carefully publicise their efforts through the professional mainstream media. Last week, EU elites at the Commission and the Parliament met to address the issue of illegal immigration and the need for more border security for the Union. As a result of these efforts of the European elite, the mainstream buzz is all about security and border restrictions. (Note the top red trendline highlighting this prominent issue in the chart below.)

Buzz words picked up by the Attentio algorithms (that’s tech speak for the magic that is the Attentio software) include “detain” and “deportation”. Maybe the EU thinks that if it draws a darker circle around all the Member States, the Union will feel a bit more unified, or maybe the elites are genuinely worried about the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants living inside the special European border-free area, the Schengen.

Either way, the political elite are not effectively engaging the public in their concerns. The buzz in the social media, the blogs and the forums created by the unpaid, unprofessional European citizens, is not concerned with non-European immigration to the EU. For the “average European”, the top concern associated with the EU is democracy.

Europeans in the social media are concerned not with the external EU immigrants so much as internal EU integration. Neither the EU nor the mainstream media is reflecting an accurate version of the “average EU citizen’s” opinions. Europe’s population is concerned that the EU institutions are losing touch with the people that they are supposed to represent. This is the difference between mainstream and social media, and this is the distance that the EU elite have to address.

If they are aware of it. Don’t we wish all politicians would pay as much attention to the media that the people produce as the publications produced by the pros?

Addendum from Attentio’s political analyst:

Further Attentio analyst analysis of the data comes up with this short summary: Europe is pretty regional, and the wider the EU grows, the more these regions mix and bump up against each other. The issue for the EU population is not so much European border controls as the lack of internal border patrols. Immigration, for the EU citizen, is a local problem, and it’s the Europeans from other Member States as much as the immigrants from outside the EU that frustrate localised populations. Prior to addressing the regional frustration that is immigration, it might be better for the EU to integrate vertically, then horizontally.

While checking out the online buzz around movies, I happended upon The Happening. This is another “epic” from Shyamalan. His great successes started with the Sixth Sense and was followed up with Unbreakable and The Village. He unfortunately is finding it hard to get the winning formula now. The Happening is universally panned, on IMDB there are one or two good critiques but there is now a planned walk out campaign in the USA and scorn heaped on the screenplay and cardboard acting.

Interestingly this movie is still bringing in great Box Office, Variety published that they brought in $40Million last week. That’s not bad for a “turkey”. It reminds me of The Simpsons which was a box office hit but of questionable quality (three episodes of The Simpsons smashed together said those in the know).

The conclusion for online buzz might be that if the studio owns a great franchise such as The Simpsons or access to a reputation like Shyamalan then a turkey (let’s call it a golden turkey) is OK so long as the movie gets mass released simultaneously, ideally globally. This is certainly what happened in the case of The Simpsons. The long term impact of that strategy is of course less clear, people can be fooled once but twice is more difficult, the franchise loses value and reputations damaged. However studio bosses are normally remunerated on the now so it unlikely they will fussy about quality if they know even a bad movie will bring in $80-$100Million. Below some simple high level scenarios.

Scenario A: studio has a great movie from an unknown franchise, they use online buzz to generate interest by early showings, select viewings, trailers and other ways to build up buzz. A critical mass of viewers goes to earliest “mass” releases and buzz both online and offline builds up and then we have good box office. This is something akin to the movie “Once” which became a word - of - mouth best seller. (Disclosure: I am Irish and I loved it).

Scenario B: studio has a great franchise or famous director, actor or producer. Clearly the movie is on the poor side “there were difficulties from the beginning”, “the movie I set out to make got hijacked” etc. The decision here is simple enough, kill it OR mass release straight away bring in the initial box office and ship to DVD 1 or 2 months quicker. At best do a global launch simultaneously and just acknowledge that the online buzz will be negative and will kill the movie quickly. E.g. The Happening

Scenario C: Great franchise, great movie would be a combination of release strategy of both A and B with significantly more speed (there is less risk of no buzz, after all there is a franchise). Push more early viewings, build up momentum with significant “viral” content released earlier and then mass release, enjoying the crescendo of buzz that will drive millions of people to the theatre. E.g. The Hulk

The Trendpedia chart below shows the buzz around The Happening and it is interesting to see the quick buzz from no-where and the quick decline. The absolute buzz is not that important compared to “The Hulk” or “Kung Fu Panda” what is more interesting is the fast decline. Still my view is that The Happening will get a spike in buzz over the next weeks but the buzz will not be flattering, walk out campaigns, cries of selling out, insulting viewers and disappointing fans, in this case a lot of buzz would not be a good thing…

There are two central concerns in online marketing: creating attractive content and distributing that content effectively.  Both factors are dependent upon the industry, product or service and the relevant online market.

Rather, both factors require an accurate Q2 (quantified and qualified) assessment of said market. To address both factors, one needs a Q2 evaluation of the social media surrounding the target market.

Content is three dimensional. It should be visual, viral, and current.

Good content is visually appealing to one’s clients or consumers. The content must be viral in that the information is info that the consumers wish to share–it must infect the individual’s network and not just the individual. Current content is essential. Studies emphasise that WOM (word of mouth) in the chaotic market that is online social media has a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions“. That is, change one letter in the address bar and one’s entire audience is new.  Current content combines the past and the present.  Current content knows the real time concerns and considerations as well as the history of the immediate trends. Current content connects the initial “sensitive dependencies” to the modern market. It is that connection and timely awareness, cleverly and creatively communicated, that makes worthy content viral.  And zing, you’ve just infected a network of interested individuals, aka customers, clients, your market.

But wait.

Content requires effective distribution. Despite the chaos of the online market, or perhaps due to this chaos, esoteric communities and networks specialising in equally valid content remain entirely sealed off from one another. In quantum physics, this phenomenom of multiple realities is called the multiverse. In business, it’s called redundant.

Successful distribution online is also three dimensional.  Successful distribution needs to be authoritative, influential, and proactive. The distributor should have intimate knowledge of her market.  Her authority should be obvious in her engagement with the online community. Distribution needs to be influential. The method of distribution must be broad, connecting several different networks and always searching for additional networks to add to the growing spiderweb of interconnectivity.  This is why all distribution must be proactive, soliciting potential clients to access the content that will influence and create new markets.

As different social media types – blogs, wikis, communities, discussion boards – become more and more popular, marketers want tools that can capture and measure buzz. Buzz numbers are the most popular metric used in that context, followed by –simply defined – influence. Share of voice expressed in the number of social media articles discussing a brand in given period of time is the measure that is used most often. It has certain advantages: it is easy to obtain using different free tools and it is straight forward to understand and cross compare with other brands. Moreover, as proven in several studies, it is highly correlated to sales for certain product categories, especially FMCG but also consumer electronics. Despite that, share of voice has low explanatory power; it delivers only quantitative information and no insights.

To gain more actionable qualitative information all social media articles can be analyzed and classified in topics they discuss regarding the brand in focus, but also in being positive, negative or neutral towards the brand. Sentiments in social media reveal how people feel about the brands and topics. There are almost always more positive than negative posts (although most posts, up to 90%, are neutral as we discovered in our studies around cars or mobile phones), but one positive post is not equal to another. They can discuss brands in general, referring to customers overall positive experience, or they describe particular products. Especially in the consumer electronic industry, general trust towards a brand is often exchanged for experience with one particular product, because users know there are significant quality differences between two diverse models of mobile phone made by the same manufacturer. Information gained from these positive posts helps to understand why a consumer chose one product over the other, even if the products are very similar.

On the other hand, there are always some negative posts. As Alain Samson notices, “even if it were the case that individual purchasing attitudes are affected more strongly by positive word of mouth, negative comments are likely to survive more easily across time and space. Negative information doesn’t only stick, it sticks longer. At the same time, bad buzz will persist longer if it is communicated to more people”. Simply, people are more likely to remember negative rather than positive messages, and they also give more weight to any negative information that they receive.

Insights that are gained from the negative articles in social media can be used for brand protection and brand reputation management. Some brands – Dell Hell being the most known one - actively monitor the blogosphere for possible negative issues and the number of brands doing so is continuously increasing; some brands could also prevent an growing issue in the past by detecting it on time and taking measures.

Positive and negative word of mouth are very important to gain good, qualitative insights regarding customer feelings, but are they equally important? Does one positive post have the same weight as a negative one? Alain Samson claims in his study, that the weight and importance of positive versus negative buzz depends on the industry. To understand which sentiment will have greater importance for a given industry, the industries must be split into high versus low commitment and high versus low choice industries. Many products, among others mobile networks, financial services or cars, are subscription products, of which mostly only one is used by a consumer for given period of time. These products tend to have fewer competitors and therefore consumer choice is limited. Entertainment industry on the other hand is an area where many products – movies, CD’s – can be used at the same time and also easily exchanged as there are many competitive products people can use.

Negative word of mouth should be more important for high commitment, low choice brands like cars. The automotive industry has high number of consumer advocates for two reasons. On one hand, it is a subscription brand, and this is a category where people – having to use one product for longer time – are compelled to be more convinced about and to which consumers are generally more committed. On the other hand, people stuck with expensive subscription products that they don’t like as much as they expected to tend to rationalize their choice anyway. People are also likely to expend more effort to find the right product if it’s a high cost subscription brand. Negative sentiment will have higher damage within these products.

For industries within which high choices exist, positive word of mouth will have more influence on the final selection. For example there are many movies that are played at the cinema and for most viewers it will be difficult to choose from 3 or more potentially good movies unless they receive recommendations about one of them. If they receive negative information about one of the movies and exclude it from their choice, there are still 2 or more options remaining so that exclusion is not the best selection process within industries with many products.

Whatever sentiment is more important, one thing is certain – sentiments in social media are extremely relevant and cannot be neglected. However, given the amount of articles posted by social media users every day, it may be very time consuming to analyze all articles about a given brand. Automatic sentiment detection is already built into Attentio’s Brand Dashboard, analyzing the sentiments in real time for our customers.

The Stryker Navigation System allows surgery to be a lot less invasive. The system allows a patient’s internal organs to be virtually “mapped” through the use of specialised instruments. “Nav reps”, navigation representatives or the specialists in Stryker’s software, are now joining the modern surgical team. (I love how software is ubiquitous in any successful enterprise these days.)

More and more, medicine is a team effort. In business terms, the patient is the CEO, the person that rises or falls with the success of the project. The patient’s chosen physician is the CFO, the person that must account for the assembled team and know the purpose of each position on the team, if not exactly how to operate within each position.

Nav reps, nurses, additional physicians, specialists, counselors, hospital administrators, insurance agents, researchers, pharmaceutical representatives, and an increasingly vast field of scientists and policy experts are stakeholders in the health of individual patients. Efficient and effective members of these teams go from stakeholder to shareholders, investing their money and time while reaping financial and reputed rewards in the health maintenance of millions of individuals.

These individual patients shop for the components of their health online. Millions log-on in China, the Americas and Europe in search of the goods and services that will make up their health management team. Manhattan Research noted that 143 million adults in Europe looked for health information in the ten countries surveyed. 62.6 million of these individuals looked for pharmaceutical information-the health consumer products over which the individual has the most control, aside from their own body.

But that’s just the beginning. Blogs explore and explain health care policy, insurance programmes both public and private, law, and the modern conditions of medicine and public health. Investment in private insurance throughout the world of welfare states is steadily increasing as public health systems become unable to provide all the options the individual patient wants and needs.

Monitoring and measuring what which individuals want and need is essential to anyone interested in investing resources or money in the health care market. Luckily, this is easily done; Attentio’s tools are phenomenal at keeping interested parties updated regarding the health industry online. As a health care policy analyst that regularly compares the US/EU health policy regulations, I am most appreciative of both Attentio’s tools and the millions of proactive health care consumers that post daily about their concerns and health care interests.