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 maintence 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.

I’ve been doing some demos with the software recently, and I’ve come up with a general pitch that seems to appeal to our clients. I want to post it here, hoping for feedback on my powers of communication.

Attentio is a personalised (or rather, industrialised and/or corporate) media manager. Acting as a filing system of all online content, Attentio organises and stores information as it is created in the Internet. It’s one stop-shopping for all the information that you need, organised by source, subject, language, country, etc.

For example, Attentio’s tools note that MySpace is outstripping Facebook in overall popularity in forums and blogs, but Facebook users are more well-rounded than MySpace users. People that talk about Facebook also talk about books, movies, and Facebook’s notorious privacy policy. MySpace posters tend to be less finicky about their privacy policies and more excited about music and cds.

LinkedIn professionals, who prioritise privacy, are increasingly visible in the Spanish and French language blogosphere. LinkedIn’s Facebook tool is also picking up in popularity as the first Facebook generation graduates from socialising to networking. All this Attentio presents in lovely graphs that allow you to clickthrough to access the content that’s been filed for you.

There’s a joke that says the difference between business and economics is that business treats money as finite. The more money one person has, the less others are able to obtain. Economists know money is man-made, just like markets.

Man-made markets are why social networks are online media superstars these days. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like have bottled up beaucoups de potential markets. Individuals involved in the networks connect over common interests. These wants and desires are all bottled up online, waiting for some entrepreneurial genie to grant the multitude its mass of group wishes.

The information in these networks is posted for free. The trick, as in any business, is managing the information. Monitoring and measuring the trends and receiving up to date details about what the people in the networks are discussing and why. Market researchers can waste hours every day searching for every article that mentions their markets or potential markets. Or they can use Attentio software.

Where there is consumer will, there is a consumer market. And the success of any market lies in identifying the consumers, letting them know that they constitute a market, and organising their demands to meet your supply. Or is it the other way round?

Either way, this is stuff any economist or business person needs to know.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive at Oracle, pulled in a cool 92 million pounds in exercised stock earnings in addition to salary last year. Howard D. Schultz, CEO of Starbucks scored a salary plus stock options that topped 50 million pounds.

AC Milan’s Kaka is expected to gross (only?) 7.5 million pounds this year, and chances are the aforementioned chief executives will be spending more time at the top of their careers than the footballer. Physical ability tends to peak at some point, while CEO salaries…don’t.

It’s a competitive corporate market, and CEOs are the new celebrities. These demigods of commerce are usually made up of a face, a known name, and a paycheck that sparks shareholder controversy.

Studies suggest that the share value of a company can be correlated to the “value” of its chief executive officer. This is part of what nailed Nardelli, the highly criticised former CEO of Home Depot. Yet despite Nardelli’s short, less than shiny record at the head of that somewhat shaky ship, the man got a sweet send-off to the tune of 210 million US dollars, over 106 million pounds. Now that is heavy censorship.

CEOs are more and more the superstar, scapegoat, and celebrity of the modern corporation. They trade in trust and infamy, linking their own reputations to the firms they represent. A lot of the value of a CEO is tied up in his visibility. One has to wonder, who’s the buzziest of the big business men, and in relation to which topics? And just how is that affecting share price? Or company brands and products?

At Attentio, measurement is underway…

So we launched Trendpedia last week, this is our “showcase” product for Attentio. For the site we had cleaned the look and feel and added new sharing features - email, delicious, stumbleupon etc. The tool helps people see what is hot in the blogosphere across a big group of European languages. Kudos to Casper and Per for getting this out.

We have only really used social media to pass the message out plus some emailing, twitters and facebook from Caroline and myself. There will be a “traditional” release next week. There is already some good feedback from bloggers and we know we need to add a widget, help people add their blog to the index and increase the number of blogs and perhaps offer more date options (we have plans for a few other nice features).

I would like to thank Bruno, Tom, Andy and Tom DB for their helpful feedback and of course all of the other bloggers out there that have linked to the site or added more valuable critique. You can find out more of the buzz by checking out the Trendpedia site (I would say that, right?)…

So when an economy stutters companies want even more assurance when they buy a service there is a keen return on investment (ROI). We care deeply about this of course and want to explain why companies should spend 10,000 -250,000 EURO a year on this type of monitoring and measurement. It goes without saying that this data needs to fit into decision making processes in communications and senior management, we see this more often in Europe now driven by a more social media savvy marketers and an agency network often driven by more “modern” PR companies. For exact ROI of course we need to talk directly to the brands or agencies but below here is our take on the high level drivers for ROI.

1. Campaign effectiveness: Conversation levels are the new metric, compare successful campaigns (benchmarks) with your own campaign and determine if the levels are good, bad, indifferent. This type of measurement enables companies to see what generates the best word-of-mouth and construct more “buzzy” campaigns. The ROI is driven by making more efficient advertising and targeted communication.

2. Digital brand evaluation: The digital brand is the online component of the brand and the same drivers apply, such as, 

i. Recognition

ii. Recommendability

iii. Customer sentiment

iv. Cultural/Regional factors

By actually measuring the influence the online brand has in social networks, blogs and forums companies can more effectively evaluate what they need to invest both offline and online. More concretely the word-of-mouth drivers for brands in online are not really being evaluated yet, so companies are actually wasting money on campaigns where they are already getting word-of-mouth support or even worse ploughing money into activities than will never get this warm hand of approval.

3. Insurance against issue that arises in social media first: The analogy - monitoring the news tells you the weather outside, monitoring social media tells you the weather forecast over the next weeks. Companies can also track issues back in time, seeing where the issue arose, by consistent monitoring (and storing) they also build a digital memory that can be anlaysed at any time.

4. Organisational benefits: All companies are now monitoring social media, often this is still ad hoc, done by interns, PR or marketing people. This is a good first step but when the volume becomes too high it is untenable. Would a company trust opinion polling to an internal person? Normally they use outside providers, this is becoming the same for social media (impartiality is important). Social media technology and monitoring enables a distinct process and methodology and if the person who handles this leaves the company then there is a system already in place. I have heard of countless examples were the “guy who had the RSS feeds” leaves and takes a whole process and methodology with him - this is not acceptable anymore…

5. Content strategy: Good well structured, timely content is valuable and expensive to produce, by using monitoring tools companies can see what people talk about really and what information they lack e.g. UK bloggers connect to US bloggers regarding medical issues, company sees this need and provides information site for European web users dealing with different regulation and treatment options. This saves money.

6. Targeting: Simply knowing who is influential can help make a product communication happen faster. This isn’t cynical it just shows that companies are listening to the countless discussions out in social media and trying to speak with the right people. There is a pretty well known group of “A” list blogs but there are 10’s of thousands of other highly authorative people that can be reached and are often interested in new products, content and information. This also has an extraordinary impact on search engine optimisation which further drives ROI.

We have put actual numbers on this with clients and it is normally very easy to explain the value. In my opinion companies will start to have more departments that look like a mix of PR/Marketing and these groups will develop around social media expertise. When this starts to happen the ROI discussion will become more about what tools drive the best ROI not that social media monitoring and measurement drives real value…

In trekking through the Internet, one looks for peaks from which to survey the landscape.

It’s a bustling and bewildering bombardment of information. Isolating a trend can seem impossible. You know you’re not alone, but how to connect the scattered conversations that talk about your topics?

Fear not, weary trend trackers. Trendpedia is here. Attentio has just created a peak for pinpointing the Buzz that you want to see. Trendpedia is a search engine that tracks social media trends throughout the European blogosphere. It’s free, it’s fun and it can be a bit prophetic.

Consider this trend:

There’s talk of an EU President, a leader to rally the tribes of the European continent. The name that keeps popping up is the former Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair. His Buzz trendline on Trendpedia eerily echoes the trendline of the potential position. The two lines are moving closer and closer together. Could this be a match?

Or this trend:

Out of the current lady soloists working their way up in the WOM (word-of-mouth) online, Yael Naim, the international Israeli-French vocalist swept the Palmarès Victoires de la musique 2008, and Leona Lewis got a number of nods at the Brit Music Awards 2008. But the real consistent crooner creating Buzz is the up and coming Welsh singer Duffy. She’s belted out a few ballads that are attracting a European wide audience on the radios and online.