Archive for March, 2009

Attentio correlation maps in plain English

Attentio Brand Maps have been launched two months ago. Currently, we have two types of Brand Maps available – correlation maps, that are based on multidimentional scaling (MDS); and segmentation maps, that are based on correspondance analysis (CA).

This video is explaining the correlation maps. Short specifications:

• Correlation maps are calculated based on the number of co-references between the topics and brands; topics and topics and brands and brands.
• The measure that should be interpreted when looking at these maps are the pair wise distances between the circles. The closer are two circles to each other, the more often they are co-referenced together.

With correlation maps, users can see the topics that are most associated with the brands and can use the information as an input for marketing campaigns and messages; and as measurement of campaign impact, i.e. if brands and topics targeted with the campaign are moving towards each other. Brand Maps also show how are the topics and brands associated in different markets; and the over time aspect illustrates the changes in associations with brands. Finally, Brand Maps can be compared for different sources to visualize how different are the topics in mainstream media (PR related messages pushed by brands) and in social media.

Ada Lovelace Day

I promised to blog about a woman in technology whom I admire for Ada Lovelace Day.

And who better than Attentio’s own “IT Girl” who developed and is currently expanding Attentio’s sentiment tracking?

Attentio’s IT Girl developed the sentiment tracking to track online opinion. With her system, Attentio can estimate online sentiment in forums, blogs, and mainstream media for particular topics.

The system is beautifully simple. If a topic that Attentio’s tracking is very close to the word “love” or “lovely”, the system counts the sentiment of that phrase as positive. “I love Ada Lovelace” is positive. If the topic is closer to a word like “hate” or “awful”, the system counts the phrase as negative. “Spinach is awful” is negative.

If there are more positive phrases in a blog article than negative phrases, the article is filed in the Attentio database as positive. If there are more negative phrases in an article than positive, then the article is filed as negative in the Attentio database. If there are an undetermined number of both positive and negative phrases, then the article is filed as neutral.

Take for example, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Obviously he is a sentimental character online. People love or hate the Brit leader, with slightly more love than hate. His name gets an opinionated reaction, ergo, PM Brown generates a lot of emotional buzz.

Attentio’s IT Girl’s development tells us at Attentio that people tend to blog more positively than negatively. Online, we have more likes than dislikes. But when we have dislikes, the impact is the amount of buzz is often more powerful than all the more usual positive buzz. It only takes a few bad reviews to ruin a lot of good word-of-mouth.

All this information about online sentiment, so easily extracted and encapsulated in beautiful, color-coded online charts, produced by Attentio’s IT Girl. She continues to refine her development, and Attentio’s customers continue to reap the benefits.

Now that’s some good buzz. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Privacy Protection and Copyright as Property

I’m a big fan of the Digital Planet podcast produced by the BBC.

In a recent cast, the commentators compared the North American obsession with copyright as property with the European concern for private data protection.

Americans, apparently, want to be paid for or at least advised about the use of their property (and Americans, remember, view property and just about everthing else largely in economic terms). Europeans, on the other hand, as Facebook discovered, want to make sure no one shares individuals’ private data.
Of course, this is a pretty big generalisation. But social networking may support it. Europeans do tend to initiate and then flock to private “invitation only” sites more visibly than North Americans. And North Americans spend comparatively more money and legal services in exploring and implementing technology that will insure copyright compatibility.
It could have a little to do with the different mixes of capitalism and socialism found in Europe and the USA.
Capitalists don’t find individual private data to be overly lucrative, but individual property, now that can be stolen. That is, in the USA, using my credit card without my permission is stealing. But if the credit card company uses my statistics (female between 25 and 30, Anglo-Saxon appearance, etc.) to profile how women similar to me use credit, well, that’s not stealing, that’s just a smart business practice that could lead to more customised company service for women like me.
Socialism, however, suggests that property can be communal (why else would the taxes be so high?), but private data, well, that’s personal. So in Europe, it’s a better business practice to be very careful with private personal data. Consumers prefer to seek out what is interesting to them rather than be “targeted” with personal emails or letters direct from random producers.

This is one reason why content and quality are so essential to European consumers–they want to find good products, not be subject to strong marketing.
It’s true that copyright is a real concern in the United States of America. There are a lot of rules and regulations at the local, state, and federal level that has yet to determine what “free” content is and what is copyright and who is culpable for the misuse of copyright material.

There is, indeed, a systemic bias behind these consumer attitudes, and one with which Attentio, with a diverse Euro-North American consumer base, has some experience. Remember, we’re not lawyers, we’re just listening.

Generally, in the USA, it seems that if Search Engines or websites use copyright material without knowing it, then they must be advised by the copyright owner of the misuse. They are then expected to do all that is technically possible to insure that this copyright material is protected or removed from the site or credited to the copyright owner or whatever to insure that the copyright owner no longer suffers an economic impact.
In the EU, however, private data is sacrosanct. Facebook had to alter an entire application last year in order to avoid a possible problem with the European Court of Justice. Here it seems that before making any personal data about users available to a commercial or even a public entity, online sites are expected to clear it with their European users.

Of course, no one is quite sure how well all these regulations work in real life. Thousands of videos are uploaded onto YouTube by millions of contributors using a variety of titles and links. Finding the random copyright abuse is not always practical for the copyright owner, and it’s not the function of the online content aggregator. At the same time, private data posted in any public forum is subject to an audience, so individual need to be careful about what they make available online.

It’s an ongoing clash of culture and custom online, and one that we will continue to follow.

The (dangerous) power of blogging

Social media reach is undeniable. What was “for geeks only” two years ago is reaching broader population. But people enjoying the freedom of blogging forget about the fact that not only friends and family can reach the information on the blog or social network but it is generally accessible for anyone. In social networks, where the access to personal information is limited and available only to connected friends, many members tend to accept connection invitation from users they don’t know.
One blogger in Finland was blogging about his studies while he was also registered as unemployed and was receiving government payments. As it happened a public servant red this blog and the poor student found his payments cancelled.
Similar story is known in Belgium where a tax controller requested to become friend of many Facebook users and was accepted by most of them. Unfortunately he used the information to find the cheaters who expensed private purchases.  He is not the first one to use the private information people post in Facebook for private purposes; in UK a girl lost her job after posting a comment about the job being boring.
Careful bloggers using social media in targeted and well thought through way can profit from it enormously. In crisis times there is nothing better than having great network online as the story of Warren Sukernek shows. He was known in different communities for his social media knowledge, especially Twitter. After being laid off he received lots of support from his network.
These stories impact brand situation. Bad and random use of social media can be rather damaging, well-thought through and planned social media strategies can be very helpful and make the difference between the brand and their competitors.

Does social media drive Search?

Well, it definitely sustains it.

There is much debate brewing over the link between Search and Social Media. Some studies suggest social media can predict upcoming Search surges. Other marketeers think that the link between Search and Social is more entwined, with Search fueling social media discussion, and then Social Media discussion driving search.

It’s a bit like the ocean, the waves follow each other so quickly that its hard to see which wave was bigger for which topics, Search or Social. But the point is that the waves keep coming. Search and Social are linked.

Search is where clients and consumers go to research something that they don’t know about, but they often know to Search for a topic BECAUSE they heard about it in Social Media.

At the same time, Social Media sites show up higher and higher in Search because more and more consumers access, trust and even engage in Social Media when Searching for information about a topic.

As we discuss the cause and search for the link between Social Media and Search, we, like the rest of the online media world, drive the two closer together. The link, whatever its origin, grows stronger and shorter each day.

Image found at PonderPlace.com, “Giving you one more excuse in avoiding your work.”