Author: Chandler T Wilson

Do to fundamental market shifts; organizations now find themselves operating within increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). As a result, there are fewer markets with unknown opportunities and places to hide during market turbulence. Business, both big and small, will need to shift their thinking on what work, strategy, and creativity are. The majority of processes deployed at organizations are superficial and lead to a marginal compared, if any, competitive advantage, or built on assumptions that are no longer relevant or accurate. At Walmart, I work on machine intelligence to optimize corporate strategy and business processes for the VUCA age. By analyzing market trends and strategic frameworks with machine intelligence and algorithms, I've come to the conclusion that competitive advantage lay in the embrace of complexity, faster information to action times, and the unorthodox, as well as being agnostic to how an entity makes money or reacts to markets - especially for asset-rich businesses. This site is meant to house some of my research and thinking in the above areas. The views and comments expressed here are my own and do not represent companies I have worked for or with.

EU Political On-line Trend Graph From the 2011 Summer

I thought that I would post a trend chart that I found. It is from the 2011 summer of rebellion. Please ask questions:

 

 

Social Media is Simple

Social Media is no longer “Social Media”, it’s media. No need to differentiate. I hate the term. It’s something a 15 year old girl or a bubbly fresh out of communications studies BA says. It’s over. It’s main stream. All media is, and always was social. Quit wasting time “trying to understand it”. Get used to not understanding, trust  real-time data, then refine. If you are one of the many people wasting time trying to understand/define media by this point, it’s probably best to just hire someone who does. The discussion is over. It’s about doing now.Ask your self or your “media expert”: “What is the end game. Why do we do this?”
The reason why media is important (It’s really simple):
  1. Empathy
  2. Data – Analytics,Text and Context Mining
  3. SEO
  4. Use data for empathetic branding and communications

Let me remind you to never set rules out side of these. There’s always new apps and gadgets but the core of sound  communications is empathy.There is nothing else to it. It’s really that simple. No need to waste money and time on some BS discussion.

Empathy, nothing more.

Heuristics, Algorithms and Communications: Quick Thoughts

The use of heuristic and taxonomy algorithms for identifying cognitive bias in  communications is a game changer.  According to SAS,  companies that invest in analytics out perform the S&P500 by 64%. I imagine the margin for communication/marketing firms is greater. The market is not anywhere close to mature, and is lopsided to a few in the know. The rest toil in mediocracy via old connections/business that will surely run ground soon.
Today’s great business’s – for the most part, are data driven. Communications is perceived  to be educated guessing.. The use of programming for bias is important because bias cannot be out run. Think of this much like “Inception” and Moneyball combined.

Thanks to social networks we have the largest focus group in history. Analysts can see what people are using to explain how they feel and think – during  specific situations or events. This can also tell  how people interact within context of syntax or an instances. Very powerful and cheap information in contrast to polling or focus groups.

There are patterns/norms with how people engage on each medium. In addition to what type of syntax they use to convey a certain type of  thought. This is all programmed in the mind for the most part. Linguist like Lakoff and Chomsky suggest that brains are hard wired to favor certain patterns that convey meaning. This plays out accurately on-line consistently.

Just a random Sunday thought…Now looking forward to watching the NFL playoffs.

Ciao

Market Shares and Topic Correlations: European Parliament Party Leadership

The chart above shows how much associated EP Group  leaders have on a variety of EU topics market share of the leaders on different subjects, including their own party. It’s possible that all leaders can be in more than one article so the totals can be over 100%.  The Green line rank the subjects of all the leaders combined. The EU ranks 1st followed by the Parliament – which should be expected, and then the Euro. Joseph Daul (JD) has the most association for the EPP Group at 81%, which is a good indicator for further party branding but not for pan EU leadership , where he lags behind all others.

On the far right, the chart shows the average and over/under performance to the market share compared to Group Parliament seats.

  • Guy Verhoftstadt (GV) (ALDE) is +7,
  • Martin Schulz (MS) (S&D) is + 20
  • Joseph Daul  (EPP) is at -20.

This does not fare well for the EPP Group. When looking at the market shares of EP leaders in context to one another, JD is consistently in last place. Why does the EPP vastly underperform while the S&D and ALDE over perform? This can be due to a number of reasons.

  • JD does not speak English
  • The EPP being the largest group cannot utilize polarizing and thus mobilizing language without alienating many of their MEP’s.
  •  JD has chosen to stay out of the spotlight given that Jose Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy[1] are EPP.
  • MS is from Germany which is heavily discussed at the moment, and will also become the new President of the European Parliament replacing Jerzey Buzek[2].

Robert Fitzhenery (Head of EPP Group Press and who controls the communications and outreach budget) explained to me that the EPP Group cannot be too polarizing on political issues because of it’s size, and cannot risk alienating some MEPs. On the other end some in the Group want to be more polarizing to mobilize debate and heighten the Groups profile.

During my work with the EPP, ALDE and GV typically lead market shares on media despite only having an 11% (88 of 754 MEP seats) market share of the Parliament[3]. I talked with Neil Corlett, Head of Press and Communication for ALDE. Neil explained since ALDE was a smaller group, they decided to follow whatever GV wanted and not deviate from a few main points. In short their message is consistent via both GV and ALDE’s MEPs. It paid off. ALDE is outperforming the EPP and S&D. And both have more money. It’s only in the last two months that MS has been generating so much sentiment. It will be interesting to see if this approach pays off in the 2014 EP elections. It will also be a good indicator of how mature the on-line EU landscape is.

Using Klout and Digital Influence

“The race is for a  system  digital currency wield the most social influence. One particular player has emerged, Klout, determined to establish their platform as the authority of digital influence. Klout’s attempt to convert digital influence into business value underscores a much bigger movement which we’ll continue to see play out in the next year. To some degree everyone now has some digital influence (not just celebrities, academics, policy makers or those who sway public opinion). But for the next year, the cult of influence becomes less about consumer plays like Klout and more about the tools and techniques professionals use to “score” digital influence and actually harness, scale and measure the results of it.”

– Just use Klout for Accountability. If the communications Unit’s goal is to get online, Klout can be a good way to hold people accountable. Nothing more at this point but there seems to be potential.

Communications as Productivity

By looking at Communications in terms of production and variables, you will save millions. By not understanding variables in communications, you will loose millions and time. Gone where communication firms can pass  Bullshit. Now it’s far from an art form with metrics. Clients should expect decision making based on sound research, in addition to  web analytics and online monitoring data.

The goal: Create the most productive syntax, which could be words, photos,video or interactive digital content. Not the most view and clicks

Resonance: 

Output time/date to channel dissemination, and how much time  that takes. It shows language adoption, which is how you win. There’s a saying politics, “Win the language battle, win the war”.  Resonance is a good KPI for knowing if the framing has retention, thus productivity.

Its can also be useful to reverse engineer a past event’s content and framing with machine learning to compare and contrast. Again don’t focus too much on “click and looks”. You might see exponential gain which perhaps are linked to offline events. That way you can also map correlation. I tend to see this pattern a lot working in politics. This reiterates the massive amount of information available on-line by listening.

More Tricks:

Use best practices in cognitive ICT, psychology,linguistics and behavior economics. A real expert will know captology, sentiment analysis and gamification, and not neglect fundamental and technical analysis.

When you understand the basic variables, you see that  each enhances or destroys productivity.

If the person you hired  doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, the strategy will loose productivity. Ask yourself, why we are paying 200-300 plus per hour? Educated guessing is over. The data doesn’t lie.

Abandon Your Communication Strategy

You or your organization is not special to the news cycle. It’s goal should be smarter, faster, cheaper. While it might not seem like it, faster -despite large investment coast, are 90% of the time cheaper. They save on opportunity loss/cost.

Many organizations and political groups write a long, dull strategy for their communications. The idea is out dated.  Today’s modern communication environment is fast. It’s real-time, and it doesn’t care about you. It’s not an option to rely on un-adaptable 10,000 word papers if the goal is to stay relevant.

Don’t worry.

If you are good at data science and have monitoring tools, you’ll mitigate risk.  Build a COMM infrastructure that can handle “real-time”. The main things is to trust in the Data (it doesn’t lie), and remember  the strategic advantage of real-time outweighs the majority of mistakes you could  make.

Blurring of Online and Offline

A few months ago on Twitter I saw “@martensepp not allowed to visit @tymoshenko” and I took it for granted.

After I realized  – and while it may seem simple, the fact that my brain did not have to process what this meant was of interest to me.

After a  couple of check downs I figured this meant there are no more social media experts now than there were during Thomas Jefferson’s era. The syntax keep changing but the meaning is the same. TJ would be just as good today.

Online and Offline = Blurring.  Maybe more on this later.. Maybe not. Just a thought.

Communications from a productivity perspective = not happening in Brussels..The data doesn’t lie.

For some reason in Brussels it’s not about productivity and developing margins for communication strategies. According to Mckinsey, a data based approach on average out performs educated guessing by  6-7%. All I ever see business do is promote logistics in operations while neglecting a process based, quantifiable approach to internal and external communications. On a Corporate or Institution level this is millions of Euro wasted.

In Brxl educated guessing is the preferred way to develop a communications strategy and we wonder why voting rates/interests go down every year .. Still blank stares as to “why?”..To communications people and firms!! It’s not about policy or white papers.  It’s about empathy and simplicity..Aren’t we supposed to be the progressive/creative branch? I think we can do better, and either we do or we will have to eat the BS. The industry in Brxl can’t hide much longer. The data doesn’t lie.

The good news is  I know for certain it can be developed.. There is some interest.

Peace CTW