Tag: Insights

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.