“Ideas are like fire - information can be passed on without relinquishing it” - Thomas Jefferson (1813)
15 Jan 2012
Richard Neal

The general order of this “passing on” is based upon a set of natural rules requiring the alleviation of the hurdles involved in relaying clear communication for building consensus. Additionally, information is usually select for specific individuals who have a tendency for aggregating into groups related to some definable degree with the specificity of the selected information. The multitudes of relayed thematic threads taking place across the global digital landscape represents a buildup of enormous complexity. Once the members of a specific group have accumulated data, the individuals must integrate that data and make decisions from it. In tightly aligned groups (online, sharing a strong common interest), collecting and integrating any distributed information usually presents as only an arithmetic challenge. With individuals in loose-bonded groups (online, sharing variable common interests of limited overlap), extremely strategic problems arise. Members typically face tension with aggregating data for the benefit of the group as well as avoiding manipulation from that of self-interested individuals within the same collective. At this point the previously mentioned set of natural rules takes place, such as, the testing of group decision procedures for robustness against manipulation from within.

Of note, in a recent study it was postulated that the presence of uninformed members within a group actually promote democratic outcomes in scenarios of collective decision making - reinforcing strategies defending against exploitative behaviors and effects. This focus of study is not new referencing the rich two-century history of debate in social choice problem sets (for example, one of my favorites is the classic density classifier problem in the realm of distributed computation). However, the latest findings are enticingly novel. Entitled “Uninformed Individuals Promote Democratic Consensus in Animal Groups” by a team led by Iain Couzin of Princeton University, the research clearly demonstrates a window of potential susceptibility to manipulation of belated consumers of new information within a loosely-bonded collective (which is the most common group usually found in topic-related discussions in an online forum) by members with alternative aims. However, what was surprising was that even during this window of exploitative opportunity, the late-comers illustrated a resistance to anything considered external to the understood premise of the bound collective (loose or strong). This ingrained resistance promoted a democratic polling effect upon the members who (usually) elected to integrate the new information based on the perceived degree of alignment of said information with the core charter of the group and not be influenced by the manipulation.

The findings from this socio-psychological research hold a great deal of promise for devising more and more accurate models of collective behavior and individual influence when forecasting for Social Web endeavors, like, product releases, press releases, sales, promotions, crisies, etc.

Ref: I.D. Couzin et al., Science 334,1578 (2011)

“You gotta have a gimmick…” – Ethel Merman
14 Nov 11
Dawson Fercho, EVP

We started Temetic in order to fight the status quo in Social Media Influence Measurement. As far as the competition in this sector is concerned… selling ambiguous buzz and sentiment based from this generic measure has always been perfectly passable. However, in recent months the customer base has shown indications of slowly educating themselves on how truly unacceptable this is. So what is a self-described “Web 3.0” business to do?

Recently, Klout (klout.com) decided their measures weren’t good enough to drive sustainable growth of their ubiquitious “buzz-based” model. Therefore, if one doesn’t have adequate expertise in computational linguistics to provide true value within their metrics then why not offer free products to those “buzz influencers” that promote said products online? Ummm... isn’t that considered then as a “paid endorsement” and not truly the measure of the Social Web consumer mindshare? Furthermore, won’t this establish a behavior where individuals compete for eyeballs to be awarded Klout’s freebie and actually water-down the actual influence attempting to be conveyed (oh... and measured)? Note: To fully comprehend the last sentence, you'll have to understand that reading something online, even reposting it to your friends, doesn't necessarily classify as "influence." We are sorry to state the world (yes, even the digital world) doesn't and has never worked that way.

Yet another Social Web freebie company has made the news lately. Wahooly wants to one-up the offerings compared to Klout. Instead of free products shipped to motor-mouths, they are going to offer equity stakes in social media start-ups. Déjà vu... This is beginning to feel a lot like 1999.

The Moral of the Story: If a company can’t provide the value it has promised its investors and customers based on outdated technology and the complete absence of social science, why not offer free stuff to generate the data you need to stay relevant while simultaneously diluting the key measure you intend on tracking?

The irony here is almost too much to bear.

Wake up, America!
02 Nov 11
Frank Gong, Analytics Manager

Having just set down to witness this overcast, cool Thursday morning in Beijing with my hot tea and laptop computer booted up, I immediately notice that Reuters in North America just posted their Wednesday evening story regarding the Social Web. In summation, they mention that company's with a Facebook presence often ignore negative comments posted to their fan page wall. Here is the kicker: at an unbelievable rate of 65%! This is completely inexcusible. This is utterly insane. Everyone should know that the Social Web is a two-way street - companies MUST continually engage both positive AND negative consumers to preserve and expand brand awareness and value.

Using Temetic's Social Web Relationship Management System called PACE, these companies would continue leveraging our advance neural network to keep abreast of the negative versus position commentary flow, be able to immediately depict patterns with negative and positive commentary, plan scenario-based auto-responses to professionally counter the pessimistic comments and/or passively disrupt run-away (viral) brand assaults - which helps preserve client satisfaction, build/send an automated coupon to assist in further quieting the loudest negative posters, and universally manage the entire social web presence from a single sign-on using one or two employees versus a room full of social media "specialists".

Save Brand + Save Time + Save Money

Good night, America.

Novel Exposure Assessments
21 Oct 11
by Rich Neal, CIO

In the realm of complex networks (think: online socialization) the whole is obviously more than the sum of its parts. When social scientists see dramatic phenomena emerging from the fluid interactions among numerous components within a network, we commonly think in terms of statistical mechanics, the language used in describing communal occurrences. Thus, for years, sociologists have explored statistical mechanics based models for these systems, especially those that present with an obvious network plexus. Despite much effort, there has existed a measurable gap between these theoretical ideas and the data extracted from real, dynamic networks – especially when considering the explosion of the social web. For example, let us take the aging cornerstone concept of marketing science called dyadic relationships – an interaction between two parties in which both have the power to influence the other. This notion does not bode well in modern social systems comprised of multi-node exchanges (sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, even millions) common to socialization across the Internet. In fact, the mapping of current online connections requires a lexicon and ability to move beyond even the more complex triadic taxonomies and social bridging elements that is normally leveraged to explain and/or predict the clustering of large numbers of participants required for network assemblage.

At this point, allow me to state that for reasons of my own paranoia in relation to protecting our Intellectual Property, I must remain more abstract than I typically would like to be for the remainder of this post.
 
Recently, we have been working on some dramatic developments making it possible to test a given networks susceptibility to a specific post or thread. In Digital Sociology parlance, a “susceptible individual” is a member of a population (network) who is at the highest risk of fully accepting or opposing the core premise of a post or cumulative thread within a network. For clarity, this is not about “sentiment” which is ubiquitous in social media measurement today and has proven to be less than reliable with its infamous litany of false-positives, false-negatives and/or majority corpus measured as simply “neutral” (offering little-to-no intelligence value). The metric of Susceptibility when matched with other Digital Sociology variables, such as, Strength (think: buzz level) and Radiation (think: meme spread) offer unprecedented insight into forecasting and tracking the lifecycle of collectivism via online channels of social discourse. This in turn leads to offering quantitative strategy for constructing realistic models that are based directly on data and not functions of abstract statistical mechanisms. Analogous breakthroughs are taking place in Proteomics, Neuroscience and even Ornithology. What is emerging from this “compound” paradigm of seeing networks via a multivariable framework of susceptance and not simply buzz is beginning to illuminate unexplored physical principles underwriting collect behaviors within corporeal networks.

A New Framework for Market Success
06 Sept 11
by Dawson Fercho, EVP

The following is an excerpt from a great book by Geoffery Moore that was just released today. It is called "Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past."

"One of the key lessons in high tech marketing to come out of the last decade is that the market development strategies from Crossing the Chasm are optimized for the complex systems business model. For the volume operations model, and particularly for the dynamic world of social media, a very different framework is needed. In this framework, four key variables get high relief: Customer acquisition, User engagement, Monetization, and Virality. Companies must conduct data-driven feedback-sensitive experiments in all four areas simultaneously as they find—or more realistically, grope—their way to market success."

All four of these key areas illuminated by Moore are handled intuitively through PACE. They should be leveraged diligently and simultaneously while religiously devoting attention to the PACE reporting stream. Our system -- having the full spectrum of required tools for today's social web environment -- turns the effort of success in the market into something much less arduous than "groping."

We recommend you check out Moore's book for some great insight into doing business in the new dynamic world of social media. [here]

Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas
26 July 11
by Frank Gong, Analytics Manager

When interacting with consumers across the spectrum of your company’s social web presence, it might be interesting to note that recent research into the adoption of opinions has illuminated that it takes only a minority of committed opinion-backers to create a tidal wave of support for a certain belief. "When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like [a] flame."

This is incredibly important to companies that are attempting to use Social Media as a conduit for interacting with consumers --- thereby building brand awareness and growing loyalty. The status quo in managing this multi-channel, multi-network digital dialog remains very “hit or miss.” Often this is experienced as the unintended consequence of customers getting upset by being ignored accidentally or feeling publically rebuffed by an errant response from your overburdened social team. This is especially relevant when attempting to construct a rapport with hundreds or thousands of social participants online (where everyone is witness to the conversation). With PACE, your company leverages the tools necessary to remain aware of comments – even prioritize “types” of comments while always being prepared with an automated, scenario-based, pre-approved response (to help appease until such time as your team can personally contact the post’s author). In a social world where it takes a little more than 10% of an opinion’s growth to have a quick, discernible impact upon mass belief, there is no room for haphazard social web management.

Stay aware, stay engaged, and stay safe.

Reference: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-minority-scientists-ideas.html

The Nature of Social Web Utilization Today (Part 1 of 2)
18 July 11
by Richard Neal, CIO

This post is the first of two in a series covering the two prime functions (monitoring/analytics and engagement/interaction) required of business for the appropriate utility of the social web. Through our latest comprehensive review of the market, it remains obvious that the measurement standard for monitoring (and analyzing) the social web is particularly under-developed, especially when considering the drastic growth of the digital medium. The majority of services offer a measure of a keyword’s popularity or “buzz”. Those few considered more advanced have produced varying degrees of efficacy in interpreting general sentiment offered in relation to that of a keyword. Sentiment gauging derived from this singular element remains consistently unsound with little in the way of offering true plausible value given the prevailing false neutral scores endemic to the Industry. Outside of the two inter-related density-based metrics, little has changed since 1995 in the comprehension of collective and emergent behaviors online.

Therefore, would it not be reasonable to expect social intelligence based on more than a keyword?

Regardless, the market continues with much exaggeration in its marketing applied to rudimentary computational linguistics used to tackle the gigantic corpus of social media. It takes little more than reading a few of the weblogs covering International Communications firms to see that they’ve been forced to develop the skill sets required of true Natural Language Processing in-house to overcome the lack of erudition being offered commercially.

Obviously, the current interpretative efforts (semantics) leveraged from the keyword density standard measure continues to leave much to be desired. It takes a vastly broader harvest to gain the contextual comprehensive required of accurate monitoring and analysis. Accurate monitoring and analytics are foundational to all social web strategies and tactics. In fact, any chance of appropriate engagement within the dynamic social web and effective interaction with your consumers remains elusive given the standard measures offered today. This is the one of the primary reasons behind the development of PACE and advanced social web portfolio management --- powerful monitoring and analytics supporting the ongoing socializing of your brand with the masses.

(Part II will be focused on Engagement and Interaction capabilities currently in the marketplace)

Maximizing the Benefits of Social Media
18 June 11
by Dawson Fercho, EVP Business Development

“Maximizing the benefits of social media such as Twitter, YouTube and MySpace is time consuming, and many small business owners cannot afford to spend as much time online while they have their day to day business operations to run. Social networking like any other type of marketing requires a well planned strategy that will result in a quality exchange between business and clients. It is time for small business owners to educate themselves about this amazing marketing tool, and find some time to exploit all of the potential benefits of social media for their business. The ones who do so will create a definite competitive edge for their business.” (2011, BizCloud Network)

We, at Temetic, completely understand the hurdles and complexities involved with all businesses (not just small business) focused on engaging consumers across the multiple, varied channels of the Social Web -- all using an array of various types of communciation technologies (from texting to IM to posting, etc.). The new field of Social Web Portfolio Management requires an intuitive set-up process, professional support (exactly when needed) and smart, context-relevant automated advisories that are always present in any of the myriad of social situations presented by the online social realm. PACE offers a scalable solution for business, from sole proprietor to multi-national brand, interested in leveraging the power of engagement represented by the growing Social Web. From full multi-account set-up services and Professional Social Web Specialists to that of an advanced neural network always watching over your accounts and vigilantly tracking consumer opinion/mood as it applies to your interests --- ready to alert you to any situation as well as offering the intelligence required to properly manage it.  

Consumer Texting... a Preferred Communication Channel?
07 June 11
by Richard Neal, CIO

Recently, Temetic had an opportunity to speak with a considerable number of consumers in relation to how they prefer to communicate with (to contact and be contacted by) businesses within the context of the Social Web. We leveraged a very strong demographic cross-section in this formal exploration that produced some very illuminative behaviors from our research. Prior to this opportunity, our initial search for Infographic data showed that very little knowledge exists about how American’s use communication at the intersection of the advancing social technologies and commerce.

Several intriguing findings came from the Generational-derived groups identified as “Older Baby Boomers” (Ages 57-65) and “Silent Generation” (Ages 66-74). These two groups consistently self-identified a predilection for text messages as their primary choice and social network-based messages as their secondary selection (e.g.; Facebook™ Messages) in relation with businesses attempting to interact with them digitally. Our data showed that these groups indicated a universal reluctance towards using email in the form of the popular email services, such as; Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Further investigation revealed that even the idea of email brought about generalized anxiety from the public knowledge of threats and pitfalls common to this communication type. The overwhelming majority of respondents correctly identified existing threats and pitfalls as phishing schemes (e.g.; identity theft threats), virus-infected emails (links and attachments within emails), and a great distrust of this communication technology caused by mounting floods of spam (adding confusion as to what sources to trust).

As is outlined elsewhere on this site, our Social Web Portfolio System (PACE) offers a broad array of communication tools for business to interact online with consumers – from Voice to cross-Social Network posting. The PACE system also uses advanced Artificial Intelligence to auto-advise on specific target market preferences for the optimization of your company’s online social efforts. For further information about PACE and how our system can assist your business in this growing era of the Social Web, please contact us.

What Wedgewood Knew
10 May 11
by Richard Neal, CIO

It is of interest to note that in 2011 the public believes refined marketing and consumer production practices to be very modern phenomena. What is misunderstood is that the core principles and activities utilized in advanced strategies and tactics (inclusive of the social web) had its roots in the 18th century. Perceptive entrepreneurs, such as Josiah Wedgewood, exploited modern aspects of marketing. Processes and positioning like targeted segmentation and trend superiority were used effectively to sell products (in his case, housewares) into an ever-broadening array of society. These innovators implicitly understood details of the social structure for which they resided… one where trends where often begun with the Aristocracy. Most convenient was the fact that Industrialization and colonialism assisted in providing ample goods at lower prices for the first time in history. So much so, that Wedgewood and his compatriots witnessed these unique, unprecedented elements coming together to spark shopping (and that of a consumer-based economy) as a new activity engaged in by a growing middle class. This emergent social class was actively seeking products and services to leverage in portraying that of climbing the social ladder towards the trend-legislating Royals.

Wedgewood became quite adept at creating and then fully exploiting marketing and advertising techniques, such as “instant status” for encouraging consumption of luxury goods that fulfilled this inherent desire to upgrade social placement. He also knew to maintain a keen eye towards the Royals. With great expediency and efficiency, this group of entrepreneurs strategically placed what they saw being worn or used by the Aristocrats on a paid accomplice who then was swiftly integrated into a large tea party, ushered into a public dinner, or conspicuously positioned on the front row of bleachers while watching a popular cricket match. Obviously, Wedgewood and associates understood the value of “word-of-mouth” conveyance. His modern day counterpart would instantly recognize this effort as equal to a successful tweet or a thumbs-up “like” vote on a fan page. The differences between then and now can be identified as the lifecycle factors involved in “word-of-mouth” activities. Without a defined strategy supported by social web portfolio management capabilities (see PACE on the Solutions Page), a modern day Wedgewood cannot effectively identify an optimal time to seed conveyance, nor understand the supporting factors of teme spread; such as susceptibility, strength, and radiation. Today it is vital to understand the obscure socialization factors and associated minutiae involved with word-of-mouth conveyance. This knowledge is required for remaining dynamically and appropriately engaged based on how and why message circulation is accelerating, leveling or dying. Your brand value depends on it.

One thing is certain: It is no longer as easy as watching the Royals.

New Metrics for a New World
24 Mar 11
by F. Gong, Analytics Manager

Marketing Research is frequently referred to as both the brain and the brawn of the any organization involved in moving products from a producer to consumer. Some believe the analyses and effort this represents encompasses a rather broad and complex scientific underpinning. Some think otherwise. One thing that has become apparent is that Marketing Research has not kept pace with current technological advances readily adopted by society. More specifically, how consumers use technology to socialize consumption/spend considerations. With the explosion of the Social Web, how does Marketing Research utilize metrics for measuring awareness, impact on preference, and an actual influence on behaviors?
 
The answer remains… it does not.

On the other hand, it did not until the advent of Temetic Research’s Digital Sociology. Concisely, Digital Sociology offers a vivid structure in which a new requisite vocabulary has been produced. This vernacular is used to construct measures in which to gauge online social behaviors that are more nuanced than the standard use of the word “influencer.” In essence, Sociology is more important here (inclusive of KDD [Knowledge-Discovery from Databases]) than a new web-centric utility being developed and employed in Online Marketing Research.

We, at Temetic, think you should try the standard “Social Media Listening” offers for your Marketing Research. Read about the data they provide towards the elements they refer to as “influencers” and “sentiment”. Use their full services. It will not take long for you to realize that: 1) all they really track is keyword buzz, and; 2) interpretation of the data is left up to you. At about this time you should also ask yourself how you measure for awareness, impact on preference, and an actual influence on behaviors.  

Too important to be overly simplistic
01 Feb 11
by Dawson Fercho, EVP

Recently there was an article published in the MIT Sloan Management Review with the title, “When Unhappy Customers Strike Back on Internet” by Thomas Tripp & Yany Gregoire. The article outlined a handful of examples of customers becoming dissatisfied --- usually when a significant time of inactivity with an unresolved issue had elapsed --- that focused upon the customer service processes of several large consumer brands (e.g.; HP, American Airlines, etc.). The examples then lead to a solutions matrix being offered…
 
Quadrant 1: Why do customers complain online in the first place?
Quadrant 2: How long will online complainers hold a grudge against the company?
Quadrant 3: How should a company respond after the online complaint?
Quadrant 4: How can a company prevent online complaining?
 
The answers within this matrix remained logical, yet extremely basic. Too simplistic. With the understanding that the authors meant to keep this as intuitive as possible to the widest audience possible, I understand their chosen path. However, one size does NOT fit all when dealing with complaints attributed to differing reasons levied against a broad array of products and services represented by an assortment of differing brands. What a customer, him/herself representing but a single segmentation stratum, displays in online criticism cannot be automatically (more appropriately: correctly) solved via a basic matrix. No, this is a problem set that is dependent upon the types of research performed exclusively by Temetic. Multiple variations of attributes must be uncovered. Understanding the customer based on the interplay of problem and the selected channels in which he or she chose to complain is critical. Comprehending demographics, psychographics… a Netnography-based interpretation is paramount. Boiler-plate responses are all-too-often seen as… boilerplate and soul-less, which causes an inflammation of the problem for brands in trouble. And anyone seeking advice as to how to prevent online complaining isn’t accurately interpreting the social dynamic taking place online.
 
If you are serious about formulating appropriate tactics, you require a breadth of data from which to build your formulae. A simple solutions matrix can’t approach this level of knowledge or sophistication… especially when your base retention, share gain, and overall market position are on the line.

  Disentanglement
12 Jan 2011
by R. Neal, CIO

Online Social examination need not be a complex or clandestine process. Digital Conversations undertaken in the public domain leveraging one or more conveyance element (text, pictures, video, and/or audible) provides a rich tapestry of information for collection and analysis. In support of this effort, Social Convention is currently solidifying that promotes the increased utility of the Internet (and associated digital technologies) to communicate even the most mundane aspects of life. This includes precise details of consumerism inclusive of demographics that business strategists once could only dream about using.

In what has become a recurring theme for us at Temetic, we are continually illustrating how the goldmine of social data remains virtually untapped by the current Social Media Monitoring Industry. The technologies developed and services sold are ill equipped for defining idea, opinion, and sentiment transmission beyond sweeping ambiguity. As a result, Temetic has disowned itself from the Industry. We no longer accept or engage in social media monitoring conferences, seminars, mixers, etc. We prefer to leave that to the primary players and hundreds of copy-cat businesses in the “Listening” vertical.

Furthermore, in embracing this disentanglement from the popular Buzz crowd we have set about to establish a more appropriate title for our unique technology and services. This incorporates the research, services, and consulting based upon the only online social science (Digital Sociology) developed to provide the context for online social comprehension. The title we have selected is Online Social and Customer Intelligence.

We warmly welcome you to explore how and why we are different.

Start Thinking Different
03 Dec 2010
by Rich Neal, CIO

The objective of true online social media intelligence research is to investigate the mindshare of the consumer in relation to your business. This should be addressed from three fundamental perspectives: data collection (the “corpus”), construct decomposition (“optimization of the corpus”), and contextual dynamics (“understanding what the refined data is presenting”). Furthermore, analytics should illuminate all pervasive or potential online influences impacting mindshare as well as drill down into identifying the premise behind any and all “thought tribes” (who is saying what, when, where, why, and how)?

+ Why is a specific segment’s opinion the way it is? What influences the influence?
+ What are the precise characteristics comprising said opinion?
+ What are the sentiment lifecycle factors (its history and radiation via the spectrum of digital conveyance elements [textual, pictorial, video and audible])?
+ Who is most susceptible to this sentiment? Why?
+ What other segments present with overlap to this opinion?
+ Are there opinions countering this sentiment?

Until you understand that the adage of “one must effectively monitor what one plans to manage” applies to the new online social ecosystem, you’ll never be able to strategically comprehend worldwide online dialogue to the degree necessary to even contemplate attempting a program of engagement to positively influence perceptions about your business.

Until you begin to understand that socialization across the online spectrum is rich in valuable consumer mindshare details that go light-years beyond the current data offered through the standard of buzz and general sentiment (“social listening and social media monitoring”), you’re stuck with leveraging Social (Un)intelligence.

Temetic Research’s Digital Sociology is the ONLY multidimensional construct available for interpreting online dialogue in the same manner in which physical conversations are comprehended.

Change is Inevitable
15 Nov 2010
by: Rich Neal

[Excerpt from the new book, "Expanding Sentience"] During Temetic Research’s educational efforts we’ve noticed an almost universally shared lack of understanding with the intricate nature of online socialization metrics. Recently, our team attended a “social media” seminar where it was literally, standing room only. What we quickly identified by sharing our treasures obtained from this “meet-and-greet” was a large number of newly printed business cards with the title of “Social Media Manager” combined with the logos of various Fortune 500 Corporations. This is a good indication! Business is starting to truly awaken to the idea that they must come to understand what they desire to manage. The gathering was quite a sight to behold spilling out across the expansive main conference room and into the adjacent hallways. There was an almost frenetic state of energy and a deafening roar of discussions emanating from the congregation of Social Media Managers, Web 2.0 “Gurus”, and assorted “Social Listening” Company Representatives engaged in high-speed socializing… about socializing.

We also observed another important element pertaining to the general state of the “Social Media Monitoring” Industry inclusive of those attendees with associated career paths. The conference was entitled “Critical Lessons in Social Media” but the premise could be aptly summarized as: “Business needs to ‘lock down’ (reserve) their corporate identities on Facebook and Twitter even if they don’t plan on utilizing these channels right now”. Wow! Is the sum total result of critical thinking involved with the complex variables concerned with harvesting, filtering, optimizing, comprehending, and leveraging online intelligence required for actionable strategies properly conveyed through this pearl of wisdom? Does this visionary Call-to-Action actually resonate with the teeming mass of people in attendance? All sarcasm aside, as a collective we’ve a long way to go in maturing this Industry.

At Temetic, we’ve come to theorize that this lack of knowledge isn’t about some aberrational dip in the average intelligence of participants involved within this Industry… in fact it is just the opposite! No, we’ve established a hypothesis outlining a psychological state that is at least partially described as a resistance to change. This state has a depth of historical precedence and is very much a part of the human condition. For example, the introduction of telecommunications at the end of the 19th century had many people feeling unsettled by the idea of having a phone physically wired into their home (following the common argument of “we didn’t have one before, why do we need one now?”). There was a prevailing mindset expressed as people having lived perfectly fine without a telephone in their house up to that point, so what was the purpose of making a change? Likewise, the idea of a leveraging a construct capable of offering a way to articulate attributes of mindshare can seem somewhat difficult and possibly burdensome to those who believe they’ve done perfectly fine with online comprehension based on the single search engine-defined dimension of popularity. This is especially relevant to firms and self-appointed “social web consultants” who have little to discuss once the pomp most fashionably allotted to only two online communication sources (Facebook and Twitter) are stripped from the conversation and proper gravitas is given the full online social ecological system.
 
The world currently views generalized “buzz” as an engrained standard for understanding the digital world, and as a result the broader market of online social intelligence consumers won’t request what they can’t properly conceptualize as being required for expanded sentience.

Deriving Context from Content
21 Sept 2010
by: Dawson Fercho

How important is deriving context from content as it relates to the ‘monitoring’ and ‘listening’ of consumers with regards to your brand, service, product, etc.? Does the act of passive listening tell you the full story? The “who, what, when, where, how and ultimately why” a consumer feels the way they do and action/in-action based on their perceived feelings shared via commentary.

True comprehension comes from understanding context. Context is derived of the surroundings, circumstance, environment, background, and settings which determine, specify, and clarify the meaning of the event. And though more difficult in the virtual realm (online), it’s still exceptionally important and attainable. Anything less than full understanding will lead you in directions not desired and can at times be devastating.

For example: A Professor at Luther College happens to work in a setting where there are non-native speakers of English. One of those students is of Turkish decent. In this setting word context becomes an nth degree more important. The Professor, teaching English as a foreign language, starts a speech class with a short story about a US holiday we know very well- Thanksgiving. During this short story a phrase is presented within the body of work “killing the turkey”. Harmless right? However the Turkish student’s grasp of english coupled with his new cultural experiences were not sufficient for him to know that “the turkey” refers to an animal, nor did he know that “killing the turkey” was not the same as “killing the Turk”. This particular student became furious and registered a complaint with the dean.

Now granted this is a physical realm or ‘meet space’ example, not via a digital substrate (the internet), but understanding full context when ‘listening’ is no less important on the internet. In fact does just listening ever tell you the real story?

The overwhelming majority of the current market offerings within “social media” or “social listening” services cannot distinguish between awareness, preferences, influence, externalities, support/resistance points, and/or behavioral segmentation when viewing the world through the restrictive lens of buzz.

It is vital to note that there sometime exists a perennial problem established with any label or topic by the sheer popular interpretation of its meaning. What is quite ironic is that an industry based upon a premise of depicting semantics has itself selected identity references that serve a self-limiting connotative meaning. The direct interpretation of the “Social Listening” and/or “Social Media Monitoring” Industry label presents as a solid case study in the accepted definition being reflective of a sub-standard realization of the original concept. One that represents a commonly shared myopia caused from a true lack of scientific and technical know-how. Why Social Listening? Why Social Monitoring? Listening and monitoring are both indicative of inert, extremely passive activities. What breadth of strategies can be directly extrapolated from listening to topic-related, popularity-filtered buzz? Outside of monitoring for popular chatter, where is data that is actionable to the consumer of the provided intelligence?

The digital world is currently viewed through an outdated, restrictive, single dimension - that of general popularity (accompanied by synonyms: buzz, chatter, etc.). This engrained view is reflected through a dizzying array of companies defining their specialization as monitoring and measuring buzz about a topic (e.g.; brand) that is being discussed via the web.

In reality, understanding the explosive swirling ecosystem of online social dynamics cannot adequately be comprehended by the standard monochromatic construct of chatter that we’ve depended on to build our understanding of the web since the mid 1990s.

One final brain teaser to prove the point of context and why just listening for buzz is more often than not misleading.

Theft in the Pub

B.J. visits his favorite local pub. While coming back from the restroom he sees a stranger take his wallet from his jacket, which he had left draped over his chair. B.J. watches the thief spend the money. Can you explain this passive response? Without full context your answers would only be assumptive.

How would your answer, and ease of deciding, change understand a fully rounded contextual understanding?
- The pub was known for having a shady reputation.
- B.J. actually wanted the thief to steal the money.
- B.J. was himself a thief.
- B.J. learned something very important from watching the thief spend the money.

Now your answer, why the passive response to B.J.’s actions, would have been more easily established and spot on.

Answer: B.J. was a counterfeiter. He left the wallet in plain view, knowing it was likely to be stolen, and the money spent. He then watched the transaction, thereby learning if the bogus money would pass as real currency without having to take the risk himself.

The Man saw the Boy with a Telescope
25 August 2010
by: Dawson Fercho, EVP

The man saw the boy with a telescope: Who has the telescope the boy or the man? Taken out of context, the sentence can be interpreted either way. Put it in the middle of a story, and the surrounding sentences may present a more defined picture.

Every day I am amazed by the numbers of social monitoring tools hitting the market that evangelize their ability to help corporations manage and track their brand assets. It seems the numbers of new entrants into this space is growing at the pace of the national debt; there truly is an arms race occurring.

99% of these firms offer "WOW" factor dashboards and pontificate the deliverance of actionable market intelligence to companies as they seek to further their brand awareness and thus their influence on consumers.

Not unlike the California gold rush of 1848, these firms advertise the best pick axe for excavating one of the most precious chemical elements in the world: Gold. In this case their tool is a monitoring dashboard for purposes of excavating "buzz” & sentiment, as it relates to a companies’ product, brand or service.

These firms, much like the pick axe vendor, offer tools and word of mouth intelligence for providing you with what they believe to be the best information at the time in directing you to fruitful grounds. In the case of brand awareness, perception, etc. this comes to you wrapped in their solution of peddling “buzz”, popularity (what they will call influence) and general levels of sentiment. “There is gold up in der hills!”

So what sets these pick axes apart? What axe is going to be the best tool in finding the best and most important nuggets that will be worth my time to extract? As I continue to research these firms the only differences I find are descriptive words and claims. At the end of the day these tools, produced for profit – I mention because most of what they claim you can still accomplish for free, leverage a technology that has changed very little from the mid 90’s.– Search technologies.

Leveraging search technologies, by witnessing the growth of players, is obviously not that difficult and why I question the cost for such tools and question their claimed deductive intelligence. One thing is for certain, they all open with wondrous claims about their keyword-based solutions via the best looking, and most highly intuitive pick axe; the Dashboard. Now I see why I am paying for this free service.

The problem we find time and again is that though these technologies work (much like Google), yes they can “pick axe” the surface, yes they find mentions, yes they find buzz, yes they understand levels of sentiment, yes they find conversations, yes they find “influential’s”, but does what they find for your corporation truly supply you with actionable market intelligence or is it only fool’s gold? Is the research relevant? Are these technologies backed by the understanding of how you and I as humans actually converse? Do their solutions leverage a deep understanding of the social sciences? Do they truly utilize computational linguistics, heuristics (machine learning), advanced data mining for the purposes of understanding real influence, preference, and customer behavior that leads to purchase decisions? The answer is no. Popularity = Influence = False.

Leveraging search technologies, that are based on a singular dimension of “popularity”; Hit ranks, tracks backs, pages views, etc. -- tell you very little and what is offered is certainly not actionable Intel.

As we often discuss within Temetic Research, "The world’s current online consciousness is being supported by a dependence on ranking algorithms following their location/frequency routines". Ultimately, the search engine has set the standard for awareness across the digital ecosystem. A common behavior is to “Google” something for knowledge about it – as the sentence implies, so common in fact, that this brand name has been remade into a verb used within in our everyday vernacular. Even in advanced forms, location/frequency algorithms used in search engines follow a premise of understanding context based on an interpretation matrix of chatter, buzz…. ergo, popularity. Meaning that through an array of comparing and contrasting mechanisms (in the attempt at driving towards a high keyword relevancy based on the masses) a paradigm is constructed that declares a normality of “one size fits all”. In terms of sentiment analysis, keyword-based solutions similarly perform tagging functions based on libraries of positive and negative words. Those "one size fits all" libraries offer the lowest level of accuracy because there are—once again—too many variations on how a customer can express positive or negative emotions in a post.

With the above being stated, do you really believe that just understanding “popularity” brings you to understand true influence and more importantly lead you to determine real customer behavior? Does it lead you to the gold: knowledge of true awareness, influence, and preference metrics, leading you to the holy grail of understanding customer behavior driving towards purchase decisions? I believe not.

For example: (99% of social monitoring and listening tools hypothesize that Popularity = Influence = product/service purchase) Count me as one of those that is aware of Brittany Spears. Thus, being aware of Brittany Spears, she supposedly has direct influence over me. Because I am influenced I will then, now or sometime in the future, purchase a $40 dollar T-Shirt? Count that as a NO! The tools, if they really knew how to “listen/monitor”, would understand that my awareness of her is nothing more than that. What these tools fail to understand is the shear and robust nature of human communication. It is not a popularity contest or understanding general levels of sentiment. It is about understanding contextual conversation and furthermore understanding true awareness, true influence and preference metrics. Further case in point. http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/05/influence-and-twitter.html

Human communication is not just about words, though obviously a necessity, but nonetheless it’s not just words one should care about. It’s about CONTEXT and the more you know about the full context of a digital conversation the more relevant and actionable your intelligence is. Signal from Noise. FM compared to AM.

To be more specific: 75% of our waking hours are spent communicating knowledge, interests, opinions, and ideas through 2 distinct features; Verbal and Non-verbal cues. Verbal Cues, emphasis and mannerisms, derive 7% of contextual meaning. 38% of a conversations’ meaning comes through in the forms of Vocal Cues, such as tonality and voice inflection, and the remaining 55% comes across in the form of Facial Expressions.

So how comfortable are you with your monitoring tool now? Considering a smile at face value, smile = popular, is obviously lacking in contextual information to draw a true conclusion as to your consumers real disposition and predictive behavior.

Professor Gates, before the full context of the story was espoused, was nothing more than a thief breaking into a home on the Harvard campus. With that intelligence he was…arrested! And harassed. What mistakes will you make with bad intelligence? Are you willing to keep paying for this type of intelligence?

Effective epidemiology requires finding patterns that lead to an overall response—even a cure—not finding one more sick person.

Tuning In the Customer Conversation
06 August 2010
by: Richard Neal

The Social Listening Industry versus the Temetic Solution is comparable with the difference between AM and FM radio. Where AM (Amplitude Modulation) was the initial radio transmission protocol and its use spread quickly worldwide, the advent of FM (Frequency Modulation) created quite a disruption as this particular protocol offered higher fidelity to the listening audience. Where AM was subject to static or interference, FM offered its format in a very high frequency (VHF). And the FM signal was not subject to static or interference like AM. The resulting improvements made for a much more enjoyable experience provided by increased depth and clarity of the broadcast program. Similarly, Temetic Research offers a much more granular signal within the context of the highly-dynamic, highly-complex Customer Conversation taking place worldwide, every second of every day.

If your choice of strategic market intelligence was synonymous with the offered radio signals, which would you prefer… AM or FM?  

The Trials & Tribulations of the Influencer Model within Marketing Science
14 Jun 2010
by: Richard Neal

Trendy book readers familiar with Malcolm Gladwell will instantly recognize his well-crafted and oft repeated depiction of the Influencer Model or Influentials Hypothesis, identifying opinion leaders as “mavens” (Gladwell, 2000). In general, the model offers that a small group of individuals carries a disproportional amount of gravitational pull (or push) with something we, at Temetic Research, call “feeling status valence” upon larger groups. Valence is the degree of positive or negative perception offered about a topic and feeling status is synonymous with emotion. This influence can sometimes be presented as having an impact that often leads to a particular consumer habit – the much sought-after effect of billions of dollars spent on marketing and advertising! The theory has remained dominant within marketing science since 1955 when Katz and Lazarsfeld’s decisive work entitled, Personal Influence, was published. In fact, the prevalence of this principle has been so heavily adopted and engrained as to be credited with the underpinnings for word-of-mouth marketing itself and can now be appropriately identified as an artifact of conventional wisdom.

What is little known is that the pioneers that set forth the idea of Influentials actually retracted the initial basis of their original conclusions based upon the lack of acceptable survey methods of the reported influencers. Instead they decided to move forward with an admitted lesser protocol of self-assessment in which individuals nominated themselves as being influential (Watts 2007). Additional measures have since been added, such as; “strength of personality” (Weimann 1994) having been hypothesized as a correlate with influence, “key informants” with designated influentials (Laumann and Pappi 1976) and socio-metric measures (Colman, Katz and Menzel 1957) in which the frequency at which peers identified individuals as advice-givers was tracked and tabulated. It must be noted that none of these standards mandate a metric of opinion change regarding any particular issue, or more critically, they remain absent of any real verification of the influence-based relationships being recognized. Instead the utilized measures rely on the respondent’s opinions of the characteristics of individuals (influencers or not) as reported by others or even self-identified – not on the event itself. This is important because influence research based upon respondent driven data is supremely chaotic and soundly unreliable. Bernard et al. (1984) concluded from a survey of multiple studies of respondent accuracy that approximately 50% of the offered responses were erroneous. One reason for this inaccuracy is offered through reasoning that memory of past events can suffer from severe distortion (Schachter 2001) such as recency (Gilbert 2006) and/or hindsight biases (Hoffrage, Hertwig and Gigerenzer 2000). Recency is a bias where individuals recall past attitudes as being more similar to current ones than they actually were in the past and hindsight is one where participants updated their prior beliefs and the memories in support of their prior beliefs upon receiving new information regarding the subject of those beliefs.

Even without knowing the detailed history of the Influencer Model, it takes little imagination to understand the strong attraction of the theory to marketers and to recognize that behaviors can be modified through social interaction. Serving as a radical example, the Nazi party was successful in modifying social norms to such a degree as to enable the acceptance of behaviors that would typically be held as unthinkable. A more benign illustration is the subtle (admittedly sometimes less than subtle) social pressures exerted towards the adherence with prevalent, yet fleeting, clothing styles. Both examples define a successful influential impact exerted from the few upon the many. The social-ability of influence can be thought of as more an inborn attribute that is conveyed in evolution as a feasible survival strategy where the impact of influence offers a form of knowledge transference or education leading to an increased security, hopefully to be experienced as survival, with a group through behavioral uniformity - among other possible reasons.

Obviously there is still much work to be done with the Influencer Model. The latest advances in the Social Listening Industry offer a means for getting around the hurdles involved in surveys and their inherent biases. Yet the core challenge still exists unchanged… the measure of influence isn’t about who communicates with the most people (in fact in the Social Media realm this usually means that someone silently reads a post, watches a video or listens to a podcast with no further interaction with the author or “communicator”). Logically the measure of influence can only be undertaken by analyses going well beyond “popularity” or “buzz” metrics. Temetic’s Science of Digital Sociology goes into 22 additional variables as an extension to the single dimension of “chatter”. This is the multivariate construct required of true online comprehension leading to quantifiable digital sentience.

Bernard, H.R., P.D. Killworth, D Kronenfeld and L Sailer. 1984. “The Problem of Informant Accuracy: The Validity of Retrospective Data.” Annual Review of Anthropology 13:495—517.

Coleman, James Samuel, Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel. 1957. “The Diffusion of an Innovation among Physicians.” Sociometry 20:253--270.

Gilbert, Daniel. 2006. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Gladwell, Malcom. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little Brown.

Hoffrage, Ulrich, Ralph Hertwig, and Gerd Gigerenzer. 2000. “Hindsight bias: A by-product of knowledge updating?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 26:566—581.

Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, 1955. Personal Influence; the part played by people in the flow of mass communications. Glencoe, Ill.; Free Press.

Laumann, Edward O., and Franz U. Pappi. 1976. Networks of collective action: a perspective on community influence systems. New York: Academic Press.

Schachter, Daniel L. 2001. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Watts, Duncan, 2007. Measuring Word of Mouth: Current Thinking on Research and Measurement of Word of Mouth Marketing. New York: Columbia University.

Weimann, Gabriel. 1994. The Influentials: People Who Influence People. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

The Evolution of Multidimensional Social Web Metrics
10 May 2010
by: Richard Neal

The socialization of the “web” is quickly becoming the primary transformative venue for society. Just as this transformation remains unprecedented for all of written history, so does the taxonomy comprising its underlying social complexity. From the diversity of communication elements (textual, pictorial, video, and audible) used for information conveyance to the array of appliances (web books, cell phones, etc.) currently supporting global adoption – the digital world is definitely changing how we interact. What has not kept pace with the explosion of this intertwined connectedness are the definitions and metrics we employ for comprehending the computer-mediated interaction.

While there has been some advances made in the relatively new sub-field of Linguistics, not surprisingly called Digital Linguistics, the prevailing model of online comprehension is not much more advanced than what can be formulated from the standard search query return. And as a result, our framework of awareness remains fixed within the mid-1990s parameter of “popularity” (with its synonyms of chatter and buzz). For all things of the Internet age, the mid-1990s are equivalent to a digital Paleolithic-era of stone tools. The singular, universally-accepted dimension of popularity delineates very little tangible data from the flood of information with which to build and maintain dynamic strategy for modern day business. This is especially impactful to operational specialties necessary for asset production and market share fortification. The practices of brand management, product management, and even to an extent, crisis management still prescribe to rudimentary, static, or even non-digital means for understanding the world. This is being done while the global consumer conversation flows at an ever-increasing frequency across the web - unexamined sans the hollow quantification extracted through the myopic lens of chatter. Obviously, the current knowledge chasm affecting business related to the absence of a solid framework for interpreting perceptions online must be closed in order for even for the most obvious level of understanding and comprehension to increase.

For an example of the systemic challenges experienced in extracting useful data from the web with current measures, imagine attempting to comprehend interests, attitudes, and opinions from a photograph (or sequential snapshots for those espousing “real-time monitoring”) of a writhing and frenzied crowd attending a rock concert. By observing the sheer numbers in attendance it is apparent this is a popular event. Possibly by identifying the general direction of attention within the vast sea of faces or the ancillary presence of pyrotechnic glare on the venue walls one can extrapolate some degree of context. However, without a comprehensive construct from which to depict multidimensional perception elements, basically how we interpret fellow humans in a social context, what degree of significant information can be deduced from the snapshot(s)? Relating this to the socialization of the web, what is required is a codification of the diverse variables reflective of the way we communicate via Internet technology. Online contact follows distinctive laws enforced by the parameters of the digital services being used. Logically, the formulation and adoption of cues and norms associated with this socialization are impacted by these rules. A depth of contextual analysis can be had through much more than emoticons or by being “flamed” by capitalized text.

We, netizens, are quickly adapting to the increasing importance of the social web by interpreting information via mechanisms that are much more complex than the discernment of popularity. People are naturally calculating metadata to assist in augmenting comprehension without the benefits of objective proximity. A sample of this higher-order information is the identification of the utilized communication element(s), channel type (affinity group message board, politically-charged weblog, etc.), attributes of language (human and/or constructed), and the ever-present variable of time (the freshness of the communiqué or topic). It is now essential for professional, business-grade metrics to evolve, adapt, and scale towards mapping the comprehension of online socialization in a similar manner.

While the promise of increased understanding via the Semantic Web remains intriguing, its current practice (outside of a handful of esoteric data-mining research efforts) is predominantly employed via the use of crowd-sourcing. “Please tell us what category or title you would give to this [text, picture, or video] you are viewing now.” Just like surveys and questionnaires, the success of crowd-sourcing depends solely upon the degree of participation. It still remains to be seen how the reality of the unfolding effort will be experienced. What must be noted is that important work is being performed by Temetic Research to map the systematics, ecology, and evolution of perception elements based on what is currently available within the digital realm (outside of the ongoing debates regarding “Web 3.0”). Through the classification and definition of today’s online interactions, it is possible to depict the nomenclature of awareness – to construct a comprehensive ontology of the socialized web. And as most business professionals would agree, understanding the complexities of awareness is crucial for gaining mindshare which is a hop, skip, and a jump away from the golden chalice of increasing market share.

When Two Tribes go to War
20 Mar 2010
by: Richard Neal

Over the past half decade, I've watched with great interest as two significant theories began building around opposite spectrums offering explanations for highly social epidemics of opinions. In one corner are the hard-core Gladwellians, a tribe of followers trumpeting Malcolm Gladwell (known for authoring the best-selling "The Tipping Point" among other titles) who espouses the social theory of Influentials or e-Influentials (from an online point-of-view). Gladwellians believe there is an orderly, defined method to be utilized for successful marketing. In sum, identify and persuade a relatively few highly-connected individuals who are at the center or nodes of broad social system networks and an influential marketing message you shall have. The core concepts shared by this band of brothers and sisters borrow heavily from the original "Six Degrees" studies of social networks performed in the late 1960s. A more modern day version of this is best known as the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that illustrates the seemingly uncanny flow of hyper-connections between people (e.g.; movie stars who can be linked to Mr. Bacon).

In the other corner, we have the Wattsians. As the newest gang, these enthusiastic folk pursue the paradigms of thought contagion transmission offered by network-theory scientist, Duncan Watts. The Wattsians believe that starting a trend is not as simplistic as identifying and persuading a small group of opinion leaders who then fan the flames of a particular opinion's popularity. Citing epidemiology, or the study of how viruses are spread (or fail to spread), the Wattsians proclaim that the social theory of Influentials remains ineffective. They counter that the emergence of a viral message depends on the varying degree of susceptibility the public has towards that particular message - where successful transmissibility is as dependent upon the receiver as that of the opinion spreader. In short, a thought contagion isn't truly contagious unless a large enough group is willing to be persuaded regardless of what the core influentials or key spreaders tell them.

As the current chapter in advertising and marketing research history is being written, the Gladwellians will be identified as enjoying the lead as evidenced through the billions of dollars business continues to spend on tracking the influencers or buzz leaders. In my capitalistic-driven attempt towards remaining neutral amongst the growing bilateral tensions, I must admit to a growing fascination with the Wattsian camp. The working analog of pathogen transmission is a great model to leverage in understanding how opinions are shared or ignored. Nonetheless, it is important to state that we, at Temetic Research, continue to maintain that there is significant research value in offering comprehensive information based from both theories (as is reflected through the Science of Digital Sociology). This is underwritten from the military principle of a force multiplier -- with a robust breadth and depth of critical data (not limited by any single social network theory), the better our clients can ensure a more appropriate spend in relation to managing their image, brand, product, service or crisis situation based upon global online sentiment.