Category: European Union

Some Quick Thoughts About the EU

In the next 25 years I question how the EU will avoid marginalization between Asia and the US? The US is more dynamic and entrepreneurial. From Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook to Pinterest, the list goes on. There’s low investment cost for incorporation, 600% more skilled immigration, congruent legal and professional standards across all states, and 20% more productivity per worker/year. Asia has cheaper manufacturing, growing disposable income and a favourable investment climate. Both have higher patent rates and less labour/tax issues. Given the advances in technology and the higher gains conceivable by those who adopt faster, these facts can quickly become more pronounced.

So how will EU leadership plan to address these issues during political instability, and lack of leadership in the first place? Europeans need to realize the debate needs to be beyond national pride at this point.

European Parliament Leadership: Channel Marketshare


While it’s trendy for public affairs professionals talk about social media, Twitter and Blogs, it’s naïve to think these are the main channels for engagement when it come to European Parliament Party leadership. Online mainstream news simply dominates in comparison.  It sets the tone of the issue, gets the most comments, and is shared ,“Liked” and Voted on the most.

Diving back into market shares and what leader controls each medium. The chart above shows  just how dominate Martin Schulz (at the time leader of the S&D at the European Parliament. Schulz has now replaced Jerzey Buzek as it’s President) was in December. MS controlled just about every medium, as well as has the most comments.

Starting from the right we see Mainstream News percentages and how each leader stacks up:

  • Martin Schulz (MS)  63%,
  • Guy Verhofstadt (GV) 25%
  • Joseph Daul (JD) 12%

On the second box from the left “MS ind MS” shows the market share of the medium/channel, in this case mainstream, is being use by the Party Leader. Mainstream news made up 61% of Martin Schulz’s online media. Comparatively GV is at 44% and JD is 35%. In all cases main stream on-line news provides the most media and comments for all leaders. Over the past six months I’ve seen a rise in Twitter, which is by far the most equal platform, and also JD’s 2nd highest individual medium.

We can conclude two things from the prior chart:

  • MS is winning the online battle for media and engagement. He owns 94% of comments leaving only 4% to GV, and 3% to JD.
  • JD severely under performs given the EPP’s size and amount of money they have.

The EU

Unfortunately the high cost of doing business – taxes, labour laws and questionable professional standards across all member states, threatens to marginalizes the EU between Asia and the US.

USA= Innovation, quick to adapt, dynamic work force, large integrated market.

Asia = Cheap labour, willingness to adapt, on the up and up.

The main issue is hesitation to adopt any new methods. In a knowledge economy such as the EU, liquidity of knowledge is a huge asset. None the less, as we see from the data debate, there are only worries and fears, no positives. This is partly Google and Facebook’s fault for not controlling the debate better, although with the cultural differences, I’m not sure it matters.

What ever side of the debate you are on, there is no way the Commission/Parliament will be able to regulate at the speed that such companies innovate and develop new technologies.

I liken it to a scenario:

Jose is trying to learn how to get a date. He decided to go to  a conference at a hotel that explains how to do this.  On his way to the room where the conference was being held, Jose encounters two doors.  One  leads to the conference  on how to pick up a date. The other door has a  sign that says “Successful single women’s conference. Please join us for a drink.  Anyone is welcome”.  Jose chooses the first door as he had planned, and continued learning and taking notes about how to get a date. The EU relationship with Technology is a lot like Jose’s approach to picking up a date, hesitant and unwilling to adapt in real-time, to the peril of the end goal.

In October I was giving a presentation about on-line media, trend, and sentiment analysis/monitoring to  institution officials. During the presentation I was  asked  “why do we need to understand what people are saying about us?” Admittedly  I was a bit shocked.  Interest in the EU has gone down every year since 2004 http://ow.ly/8w2Gs, as well as voting rates.  In my view  a  good place to start building a proper message that mobilizes people, is to  find out how people perceive and talk about you in the first place. Thinking about the institution officials statement further, I concluded the real issue wasn’t that that  online monitoring couldn’t be useful for their goals, but it  would have created a real-time approach, the antithesis of the  institutional process Europe is familiar with.  The incentive wasn’t there either.

In the globalized future hesitation is dead, improvisation is king, and competition will be fierce. Both EU firms and institutions spend too much time discussing what technologies such as social media mean or can do but never act. On the opposite,  competition is the USA led to elections becoming a  science. The 2012 campaigns will feature natural language processing, text mining, sentiment analysis, and data scientists. These technologies will marginalize every medium and word. There will be  no room for “educated guessing”. This is efficient and saves time and money. Further it may help  yield larger voter turnout as did the 2008 U.S. elections.  Forward to the EU. The system is not competitive. The money is provided by the public, and the European Commission  is in charge of getting  people to vote with a neutral message. And they are still having conferences  about what social media means.The future will embrace adaptability and change, you don’t get the luxury of writing a 10,000 word strategy paper, or a controlled institutional process, life and business  move too fast.  If the EU  is going to have a chance using technology to it’s full advantage , it must first take a shot, and ask it out on a date.

Sentiment Analysis: Why is it important?

WHY IS ONLINE MEDIA IMPORTANT TO LOOK AT?

I examine this question with the help of Charts and the EU. Thank you..Click on the Charts to make them bigger.

So why is looking at on-line media important? The chart above (Lau, 2001) shows online media has expanded in the last 16 years. Online news has displaced print and broadcast to represent 46 percent of all content monitored globally. Increasingly online communications/media is becoming the main source of people’s knowledge for political affairs. In the era of the mediatization in politics and democratic theory, which assumes that an informed and attentive public is necessary for democracy to work effectively (Lau, 2001), understanding on-line communications is vital.

The Analysis of on-line media is a cross between what’s called data science[1] and “Culturomics” (Leetaru, September 2011). The goal is to find cultural trends through computerized analysis of online media to develop insights in the functioning of human society, thoughts and actions (Michel, et al., 2011). This process has been very accurate in forecasting instances such as box office sales (Mishne and Glance, 2006) to the stock market (Bollen, et al., 2011). To illustrate the power of data science and sentiment analysis in a political context scientist – using a super computer, applied tone and geographic analysis to a 30 year worldwide news archive. The scientist were able to forecast the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, the stability of Saudi Arabia, and estimated Osama Bin Laden’s hiding place within a 200–kilometer radius, in Northern Pakistan.

The point of all of this?

Media is a very accurate source for insights into the human condition, as well as our thought process. Now with the rapid expansion of online media, there is a wealth of untapped knowledge and syntax to further analyse.

EXAMPLE:
The chart above shows the volume of searches based on the terms “European Parliament”, “European Commission” and “European Union”. They were also translated into French, German and Italian for further accuracy. The data was gathered with Google Insights[1] for Search. The chart does not track positive or negative sentiment, just the volume of the terms searched through Google[2]. The data clearly shows the interest in the EU has gone down since 2004. For both the European Parliament and Commission the top locations for the searches of the term were Ixelles, Luxembourg and Brussels – all home to the institutions themselves. This illustrates the “Brussels Bubble” that so many talk about
The Google insights data mirrors voting rates. In other words, voting rates (above) and participation have gone down.
The variables:
  • Lack of a unified media, hesitation on real-time engagement, failure to leverage modern instruments and an incentive to do so.
  • MEP and political parties do not have to raise money for re-election, and there is little incentive to actively engage constituents, on an individual MEP level as well since the parties puts forth the Politicians.
This frame work has lead to autonomy and citizens that look more toward national politics for answers. With the current financial “Euro” crisis it would be easy to assume that the interest in the EU – whether good or bad, would go up. This has not happened.

[1] With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. See examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search.

[2] Google’s search market share in Europe is around 90%. In the U.S. it’s around 65%.

[1] The profession of interpreting and creating value from Data.

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:

 

 

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

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.