This week we’re announcing version 3.0 of the dashboard and every day we’ll post here a little more detail about what the new features do.

The feature we’re most excited about is the new Attentio ‘Brand Maps’ which we believe has the potential to disrupt the Market Research industry. How so? Well first let’s start with:

What is it?

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Was it Milton Friedman that said that there are four types of spending?

1. Spend your money on you.

This makes the spender cautious–interested in acheiving an individual ratio of cost versus value. You want a nice car that you like to drive but that doesn’t break your budget in gas bills. This is where the consumer gets the best ROI, return on investment, because the consumer dictates the value of a purchased good or service.

2. Spend other people’s money on you.

Now the spender can be a bit less concerned with price and more concerned with quality (or status). You can blow a bit more cash on a nice car if your parents promise to cover the insurance. Not such great ROI for the spender, but a lot of fun (or at least less cost anxiety) for the person that ultimately consumes the purchase.

3. Spend your money on other people.

Do you buy Grandma a piece of jewelry or a nice sweater? What if it’s for your girlfriend? For Valentine’s Day? After a fight? The logistics involved in this question merit a certain amount of cost/value math modified for the person on whom you’re spending the money as well as the reason why. ROI can be hard to judge here. As a consumer, Grandma may get a lot more satisfaction out of a sweater than a diamond ring, but the ROI on a ring for your girlfriend may make you, the spender, happier.

4. Spend other people’s money on other people.

This is where a spender generally wastes the most money and gets the worst returns. This is why a lot of government spending is notorious-there is too much cash with not enough accountability or consumer satisfaction. If, as some studies suggest, the United States economy spends close to 11.3 billion dollars on health care yet some 47 million Americans, 16 percent of the population and growing, are uninsured and unable to access satisfactory, much less appropriate care, one has to wonder where the money is going.

Number 4 is also where marketers get stuck. They spend corporate cash on campaigns geared towards nebulous customer niches. Measuring the returns on some of this marketing can be difficult. Are consumers happier because they are consuming more? Or is a brand better off because consumers are more appreciative of the corporation’s reputation and sense of civic sponsorship? How to tell?

Measure online buzz.

Most online communities attract like-minded individuals. These communities congregate around topics, ideas, events and even brands that interest them. They talk about these initial community interests, but they also discuss other issues of importance to them.

For example, an online community built on interests in individual health and lifestyle will inevitably discuss favoured lifestyle trends and diets. Measuring and monitoring the buzz produced by these communities allows producers to anticipate the needs and desires of their customer niches. It lets them measure the possible returns on marketing before launching a campaign, identify where to launch the campaign and attract the most relevant and most reactive consumer audience. Lastly, after launching a campaign, monitoring and measuring online buzz can demonstrate how the buzz picks up and reacts to the campaign.

Listening to buzz lets a marketer know whether Grandma would buy herself a sweater if she had the cash or a diamond ring. It lets a marketer know not only whenand why the girlfriend wants the ring, but how big, how many carats, and with what setting. Online buzz puts a marketer as close to the market as s/he can be by letting the consumer dictate the best way to spend corporate cash and get real, measurable reactions (and returns) from consumers.

An Economist article explored the trend of medical tourism in Europe and the United States. Consumers of medical services are going abroad to escape high prices and long lines at home. Hannaford, a grocery chain, and a few intrepid insurance programmes, are exploring the possibility of lowering total employee heathcare costs through incentivising traveling abroad for health care needs.

Physical travel, however, is the tip of a rapidly decentralising (disintegrating?) health care consumer paradigm. HCPs (Health care consumers) also go online rather than travel abroad to find products and services that they couldn’t otherwise access. In doing so, they frequently discover new and innovative products and services that pique consumer interest and fuel further individual (as well as corporate) research.

HCPs find communities of like-minded patients and caregivers and exchange information, ideas and opinions about health care goods, services, even specific providers. They research medications and treatments through forums and health care social networking sites like Trusera and PatientsLikeMe.

HCPs that share languages compare and critique public health systems. They let each other know what’s available where and who or which insurance is willing to fund what. Even institutionally-based medications, once limited to the institution that provided them, can now limit the institution. If a patient can’t access the med that s/he thinks s/he needs locally, s/he goes online and finds a provider that is willing to access the HCP–through the mail, through a network, through travel.

Health used to be geographic. What the next-door neighbor perceived as “health” could be considered standard for the neighbourhood. Now, the community of patients or HCPs determines what is “health” for their community. A patient suffering from dysthymia, a mood disorder, can go online and ask fellow patients across the globe how they best deal with depression. Then that community can advise, support, sympathise and even supply a patient with the products and services that patient wants.

We often see things the way we’ve seen things. And we talk about things the way we’ve talked about things.

Conversations are a reflection of reality. People go online to converse. They reconstruct and share their opinions of real world concepts, products, brands, and services. More and more, the online world is an evolving reflection of the offline world’s perceptions.

Traditional marketing generates surveys and sponsors “opinion polls”. Traditional marketing depends upon samples of consumers willing to dedicate time and thought to questions and ideas carefully presented to them by corporate mouthpieces with an obvious agenda.

This isn’t a bad way to go about collecting opinion, but it is limited. First, marketers must find individuals willing to respond, and then craft polls in such a way as to bypass predictable answers. Ultimately, the marketer risks pursuing topics chosen by the corporation or its representatives and not the consumer.

How to address this limitation? Complement the offline research with online engagement: social media. Online conversations are a marketer’s every desire. Online conversations are real opinions, spontaneous discussions, and individually initiated networks and communities of clients, customers and potential customers. These netizens share information, opinions, and recommendations. And all this is recorded and stored forever on the Internet. The only issue then becomes finding it, measuring it, and monitoring the buzz for trends. Trends online can initiate offline surveys or validate a virtual or real world marketing campaign.

Take, for example, a viral video initiated by Carlsberg beer. A clever “whistle” ad with a universally recognized tune, it’s attracting a lot of views on You Tube. Not only has this ad attracted viewers, its generating copy-cat fan ads that compete for attention online. And below each video are comments that admire critique and encourage a growing fan base for the ad as well as the product.

Carlsberg is already a something of a house name for You Tube ad fanatics. Fans self-select based on favoured ads. Perhaps surprisingly, a football ad by Carlsberg attracted not masculine ballers but a number of feminine trawlers. Girls scanning You Tube in search of the celebrity sports star rather than the beer, left a number of comments about the ad’s…aesthetic qualities. The whistling video earned attention from guys and gals looking for a nice tune and a laugh, and the football ad sported a girl-groupie appeal. Both audiences left their comments and criticisms below the videos and no doubt surfed some additional related videos suggested by the You Tube platform.

Social media is more than a target consumer base. In social media, the consumers target the market and let the marketers hear who they are and what they like. Traditional marketers can use this information in framing their own off and on-line research.

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…

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.

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…

Health care today is an individually-consumed good that produces benefits for everybody.

But there is a problem–”health” is subject to interpretation. By the patient. By the doctor. By the nurse. By the judge or the lawyer or the jury or the neighbour or the parent or the secondary school counsellor or the teacher or the boss that sends/does not send the kid home.

Health care consumers know this. That’s why individual consumers are taking ownership of their health care-online. They post and participate in sharing side effects, suspicions, and successes with medications, diets, and treatments.

Online, there are no national boundaries limiting the information about medicines and health care services. Consumers price shop, compare experiences, and exchange advice. But not with everyone. Consumers prefer to talk to each other-consumer trust other consumers, in health care as in all other consumer goods.

Consumers do not trust the professionals-at least, not directly. Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is despised. Expertise is suspect.

But experience is king. If a pharmaceutical has good word of mouth online, it attracts a dedicated and appreciative following. Consumers are “pulled” to the medication by positive reviews, rather than pushed a drug by DTC.

Each Friday I plan to feature a social media campaign measured using Attentio’s tools. These won’t be clients–I’ve set up projects to follow campaigns featured in the online news, like the Cheetos Underground ad campaign and Nissan’s viral video campaigns, also linked to NBC’s Heroes.

This week, I want to play on a theme introduced in the last blog. Social media and government–in this case, social media and statehood.

Edward Bernays, the alleged “father of public relations”, thought that to successfully rule the people, government had to be hijacked by a skilled elite. Then this elite needed to successfully sell themselves to the people.

Bernays did not believe debate and measured opinion equalled votes or even effective government. A former propagandist for US President Wilson during World War II, Bernays thought it best to appeal to the irrational masses, not the rational individual citizen. Earn their appreciation and acquiescence, then do what’s best for them. After the war, Bernays went into business and branding. He was incredibly successful.

Veton Surroi, a Kosovo statesmen, told The Economist that earning national sovereignty–the recognised right to govern yourself–requires a certain amount of nation branding a la Bernays. Prior to setting up a government for the people, most of the people must buy into the idea that the nation exists. This means marketing your nation to the international community as well as the people that must eventually make up the nation. Kosovo is a controversial brand at the moment. Not even the European Union can afford the new nation, although some nations have made an early investment.

Rather like some populations and national leaders begun investing in the new hot nation-brand, Tibet. While no one can afford to isolate the established brand that is China, Tibet has picked up an impassioned consumer base–on the ground and online. There are hundreds of websites and many more blogs closely following the territory and its people’s movement for independence. Tibet has sailed past Kosovo as the poster child of national independence. And other groups are Buzzing about more autonomy as well—who will be next to adopt the trend towards statehood? Time will tell which state sells its sovereignty with the most success.