Category: Public Affairs and Communications

Howard Dean: “The Internets”

The graph show search interest of Howard Dean and John Kerry in 2004. You can see the Dean Scream had a drastic effect.

“The ability to connect via the Internet to groups, segments, and individuals changes everything. It flattens the process and creates a bottom-up approach to participation,”

– Joe Trippi, Pioneered the use of the Internet in Howard Dean’s 2004 (Greengard, 2009).

The internet has been used for politics since the mid-1990s. The Web 1.0 sites were basically e-brochures where candidates would post updates, news, information and their position on issues. While the sites helped people get information and candidates voice their views, they did not target voters. During the 2004 Presidential Democratic Party preliminaries, Howard Dean started targeting potential voters.

Dean’s campaign was the first to solicit on-line donations, in a successful manner, and raised the most money of all DFL candidate ($25.4 million), second only to George Bush ($84.6 million) (JUSTICE, 2003).

Dean used the internet to form coalitions, meet up groups and targeted fundraising ads. The last point is of interest because it changed the SOP for fundraising. Past campaigns relied on “Big Money” donors. For candidate from lesser populated areas, the “Big Money” structure was inefficient. Overhead from travel, facilities and the fact there are not that many big money donors out there, were big road blocks. Obviously, this process led to a level of exclusion and elitism by not incorporating “average folk”.

Dean was able to solicit large amounts of money, with targeted ads, from many small donors. This led to a level of inclusion which bought political points with television, and made a candidate from Vermont the front runner out of nowhere. Further it was the first time a Democrat chose not to receive federal matching funds program (sourcewatch, 2008).

While Dean’s campaign was the first to harness the web,he was the first one to die politically from it as well. On January 19, 2004, just as Dean’s campaign gained momentum, on a cold day in Iowa, the “Dean Scream” or “I Have A Scream speech” was born. What many people do not know is Dean was very sick. The microphone mostly picked up Dean, not the audience. During the rally, the “Dean Scream” would have been unnoticeable to most.

This caption, replayed many times, sealed the coffin for the campaign. The action looked unpresidential according to political pundits (Gayember, 2004). The new era of political communication had just begun. It wasn’t a policy, lack of funds or support that ruined Dean, it was one action, then finished. 24/7 communication had made the political world a place where one bad action could ruin a campaign. Instead of flattening the playing ground, the standard has become so high that Joe Trippi’s statement above, is now, just a dream.

On another note, here are some facts about the 2008 elections. How will they change for 2012?

During the 2008 election there was a shift in election campaign output. (Cisco Systems, 2008 )

  • Television 82%
  • Internet 62%
  • Newspaper/magazine 49%
  • Radio 30%
  • On-line video 30%
  • Cell phone/mobile device 4%.
  • 75 percent of these on-line video users felt that watching video on-line enabled them to follow presidential election news and events more closely.

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.

Active Communications

The idea of “Active Communications”  is based heavily on media monitoring listening data AND proper framing, which is a bit of an art (unless you have first class AI/NPL skills) . To work efficiently, a multi-channel infrastructure that allows for real-time content is paramount.

Important concepts to take away:

  • Timing and message coherency, to create a critical mass.
  • Trust the data for real time decision making.
  • Location based targeting with Fundamental,Technical and Sentiment analysis, per channel/medium.

Perhaps the biggest aspect is willingness to abandon prior methods after the data is received. You might be more comfortable with Twitter or another channel, but for the specific campaign it could be a  waste of time. Don’t fight up stream.

NLP: Value Greater than just Positive and Negative Sentiment.

Positive (P) and negative (N) sentiment are just transmitting two results based on many other variables. This in itself contains little knowledge. For creating strategy, it can only bench mark after the fact.

Inherently the use of data is to make better decisions for the future. Production is expensive and time consuming. So is deductive reasoning.  The main goals should be to move away from adjusting to the end reaction and migrate to a predictive model. Look at the context in higher resolution i.e. control for  variables which lead to PN sentiment.

Here are some suggestions

  • Time of day
  • Medium (Twitter,Facebook ,Blogs, Mainstream news)
  • Comments PN sentiment
  • New dissemination to comment count (time, PN)

If you are advanced, use NLP tools that allow for custom taxonomies – within the NLP,  to create rules on varibels like types of framing. On a medium level this is very good at prediction, but more on that later.

Ciao

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

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.

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.