It's all words, but some words are more equal than others

Words. Wrapping up west wing last night (I had left the final episodes of season 7 dangling unseen for months, obtaining, as is the law of desire, more pleasure from anticipation than from the satisfaction itself, though I hope this does not apply to the current election year), I got a real kick from the show's depiction of political campaigns, and messaging in particular. The show's characters, brilliant beyond what is possible in the swift repartee and back-channel corridor correspondence they so effortlessly carry on, day after notable day, in the hallowed halls of the White House, drop political messages as culturally on target as they are tactically on point. Practically inventing policy from the wings of power, they print flights of fancy on poetic updrafts that, as if in winged migration, rise above the current political climate's spin cycle like the bouncy air that escapes a laundromat. Their words lift, and with them, our spirits.

At risk of overburdening the better angels of our nature with the heavy load of worn laundry, however, I'll cut out the preamble and let old Uncle Abe be.

All words are equal but some are more equal than others.

A philosophical moment here, then, on social and conversational media , on what we do with them and how analytical tools can make sense of them. And on the differences in both Kinds of Talk and the markets that are moved by them.

Strategic talk: this kind of talk wants to move the recipient, the listener, the audience, and without sincere concern for what s/he/t/hey *think*, produce a response or action.

Communicative talk: this kind of talk wants to maintain a relationship, create and build understanding, if not agreement. And even if it fails to produce consensus or peace, at least bridge differences and create some common ground upon which might grow a common wealth.

Professional and business needs and interests: are PR, marketing, advertising, branding, sales, and so on, and have an interest in distributing their message as well as in tracking audience follow through.

End users: more often than not, simply want to use the tools without hassle from the salesforce, for the purpose of coordinating daily realities and building and enjoying friendships online

Problem: Arriving at what is the unit of meaning that matters.

Solution: Varies by the profession, business interest, in other words the beholder in whose eyes value takes recognizable shape.

Current conversation and social media analytics still focus on words. Words can be searched. Sentiments cannot be searched. Opinions cannot be searched. Friendships cannot be searched. Influence cannot be searched. And attention cannot be searched. Yet.

Words look the same because the medium flattens speech into text, eliminates genre, idiom, style, and relationship from the form of writing analyzed.

In the case of speech, the utterance, utterer, and meaning uttered do not coincide: what a person says, and means in saying it, offer two distinct acts, and the listener can watch the person talking, or take what he says at "its word." But the speaker is not present for the production of meaning online, and only the words remain. Context, stylistics, intent, and so on can now only be inferred.

Words. We search them and from the results, try to obtain narrative, message, opinion, recommendation, review, conversation, even relationship, expertise, and psychology. We find the patterns we can see, and miss those we do not yet know how to map or model. The use of conversational and social analytics across social media is still focused on words, and the patterns we use rely on a coincidence of word use across all forms of online writing and talk. What we see is often what we want to see, what we can do is what we can think of doing.

The needs of PR
PR is about articulating messages that both define facts and seek to shape opinions. It's a form of impression management in which the burden is placed on the messaging to present the best face, the most appealing story, with the least controversy, and yet in a voice of measured integrity and with as much corporate sincerity as possible.

PR is an art -- the art of practicing strategy and executing tactically in forms that border on the personal. The press release is not so much a statement issued by a company as it is a statement already written about the company. Produced by an inside or outside department or agency, it takes the public's position on the company. This alone makes it interesting, for in taking the position of the consumer, outsider, market or what have you, the press release is highly suggestive: "here's what we would like you to think about us, in words you might find easy to pass along or quote" -- the release heads off controversy and anticipates challenges to the extent that it can, and is already a first cycle in spin.

I say this without judgment -- PR is an interesting form of discourse, and not a simple one. It requires a certain amount of knowledge not only of the company being written about, but about the audience being written to. PR is useless if it doesn't fly. But PR is even more valuable if it is picked up by end users, consumers, and so on, and passed along that way. There's no competing with the power of a message voiced in the first person consumer.

Some of the ways in which PR can benefit from social media and conversation tools like twitter would include:

distribution: how far has the message been distributed?
influencers: by whom?
pickup: with what kind of impact and pickup?
citations: where has it been cited/linked to?
On message quotes: where do we see direct citations, and by whom?
Off message quotes: where do we see topical citations, but reworded (and why? for credibility? or as a challenge to our message?)

Speed and acceleration: how quickly does our message get out? is it rapidly reported and then tails off, or does it accelerate? can we map that distribution path?

Tracking PR through social media:

• track messaging
  
• track mentions
  
• track links
  
• track circulation
  
• track comments and commentaries
  
• track reactions (sentiments)
  
• track influencers
  
• track social media pickup
  

The needs of branding

Branding has to do with the impression a brand makes on its customers (as well as a broader audience). This impression is part image, part message, part feeling, part tone, style, class, taste, and so on. Some brands want to be easy to identify with. Some play hard to get and out of reach. Some brands enjoy broad popularity, others seek to stand at the pinnacle of perceived value... Brands have historically sought out the advertising and branding media that suit their messaging and brand the best. And the internet has not historically been a site of deep value. Rather, it's seen as a medium that flattens out the differences between brands, that reduces margins to zero, laughs at loyalty, and which replaces the market of scarcity with one of surplus. It is hard, brands may feel, to rise above the sheer volume and availability of goods sold through commerce online. 

Might social media offer new possibilities? Audiences that want to show their brand allegiance publicly? Groups that enjoy brand affiliation? Markets that subscribe to a brand and buy with affinity? Consumers able to show their brand identities -- motivated by the social rivalry and mutually reinforcing "desire" that capitalist forces are meant to unleash when more people want the same thing than can  have it? 

Would users make brand announcements in their status or feed updates? Would they place brand decals on their facebook or myspace pages? Create slide shows, animations, videos, and other mashups in which they recontextualize pop culture, friends, and brands into one living and dynamic expression of co-branded personality and style? Or sign up to brand pages on social networking sites, track and subscribe to feeds, event announcements, participate in boards, forums, and so on and so forth?

Branding is about listening, watching, and possibly about leading consumer messaging and uptake -- but with an interest in seeing one's brand embedded in common discourse. So in this sense, yes, a brand wants to track conversations on social media: for the impressions made, for expressions in which it is embedded, for the phrases, images, and other kinds of statements that end users (consumers) add to the brand. For sentiments expressed about the brand, to whom, in front of whom, and so on.... Some brands may want to become conversational -- that is, reduce the separation between themselves and their consumers, and instead welcome and participate in dialog, trust-building interactions, and mutually enlightening exchanges. Not all, in fact most brand will not do this -- it is risky (or seen as risky), it takes control away from brand managers, and it can be seen to reduced brand equity (insofar as equity is "distinction" not provided by the common person)... But many may try, and those to do so first stand to benefit from the novelty of social media branding the most.

Tracking branding through social media:

• track impressions
  
• track sentiment
  
• track propagation
  
• track social media mentions
  
• track authentic speech for phrases, expressions
  
• track markets for affinity groups
  

The needs of market research

• track competition
  
• track trends
  
• track culture
  
• track society
  
• track mass media hits
  
• track social media cultures
  

The needs of sales

• track sales
  
• track seo
  
• track propagation
  
• track clickthroughs
  
• track interest
  
• track social media links, feed, profile page mentions
  
• track competition
  
• track reviews
  
• track recommendations
  
• track ratings
  

The needs of event promotion

• track word of mouth
  
• track reach
  
• track influence
  
• track trends
  
• track anticipation
  
• track sentiment
  
• track buzz
  
• track social graph adoption and pickup
  
• track changes over time as event nears
  

Note: this post is "ongoing".... 

Radian6 and climate change: views of mainstream, blog, and twitter conversations

Using Radian6 to investigate social media conversations around one of my own personal involuntary preoccupations -- climate change -- I geeked out this afternoon for a while and have these screen shots to share and discuss. What you see above are three topical clouds created by a search across media types over thirty days for the keyword phrase "climate change." (Click it for actual size.) All media (top left) includes blogs and forums, video, images, mainstream online media, and twitter. The top middle shows results from just blogs and forums, and twitter. And the top right window shows results for twitter only.

Below the cloud panes is a topical drill down spanning the same time period: showing results for terms within the "climate change" results. (In other words, a comprehensive survey would require additional searches. Each results in a bucket of results that can then be further filtered and searched.)


I noticed "radiohead" in the twitter view, top right, and clicked it to see posts. (screenshot on left). Cooler heads prevailing, Radiohead had turned down a US promotional gig to spare the air. True or not, I didn't have time to check.

Looking at the results, I clicked the peak on April 21 to see what was up that day. Doh -- earth day. I entered that, and a few other terms, for the screen to the left. (It being earth day every day here in San Francisco, this one had pretty much slipped out through the fissures that crack me up, in my mind, way in the back of my mind.... Ok, honestly, earth day a bit redundant nowadays, isn't it?)

I used the cloud views to find keywords to add to the trend panel. Radiohead didn't register in the trend panel, for example. "Green" is just below "earth day," suggesting that perhaps "Green day" could have taken advantage of some free media coverage (are they still together? I confess I don't recall. Another case of fissure. Fizz-ure... ) Next in prominence on that day were "food," "gas," "action," and "president," which, if I were a writer for The Colbert report, I could have made into a joke, using, perhaps, either "food" or "gas" as the subject of "action" taken against the "president."

Interesting that on Earth day both food and gas were of concern. Food growing or food eating? And seeing as "prices" are just beneath "president," it's possible that food and gas prices may have occurred in Earth day commentary that included administration policies and leadership. Or not. One doesn't want to read between the lines. (Though the lines are pretty close together, and track nicely, so hey, why not?)

As you can see making sense of these verbal trends is not rocket science. Could we have guessed without searching that food and gas prices would come up together? They track with earth day, but to be fair, there was a UN report released that wknd regarding the food crisis. It's possible that they're related. Wouldn't take a poet.

Now what's cool about this tool is that you can read the news sources for any additional key phrases right here. Even view videos. And you can browse a list of influencers (sites and blogs) for the topical profile. Shown here are influencers and a "river of news." Global warming was the biggest hit within "climate change," and shown here are posts that refer to global warming. (Inluencers can be sorted by unique commenters, total comments, enagement (number of comments and length of comment), and topical inbound links.

Now in this view, which focuses on April 20 - 22 (earth day and one day prior and post), there are interesting differences between the topic clouds for mainstream media. Look at the list below. Differences in terms used in the mainstream media, on blogs and twitter, and on twitter alone, are clear. Mainstream media describe a high-level view of the discourse, blogs, commentary on that discourse, and twitter, more personal and actionable conversation.

_____mainstream_____
emissions
issues
america
government
department
public
scientists
national
federal
country
world


_____blogs and twitter_____
save
reduce
live
weather
real
better
information
future
article
action


_____twitter_____
industry
fight
students
right
difference
help
water
citizen
officials
college
sustainability

So far this search has turned up roughly what one would expect of it, and indeed you find what you're looking for when using measurement tools. The benefit of tracking end user conversations such as those on twitter ought to be in the authenticity of twitter talk, and in its speed and immediacy. Radian6, because it updates in real time, can be used to follow these conversations as they happen. That said, it's necessary to supplement twitter talk with blogs and mainstream media, for they provide the narratives, arguments, and semantic map of the conversation space. Topical context is assumed by twitter users (as it is often in chat and IM) -- that context is provided by the slower talk media. At this time, twitter is still very small, and on-topic results for searches on twitter are noisy and fragmented. But for those interested in personal expressions and conversation, and for a read on real-time audience attention and interest levels, there's a lot of potential yet in what twitter can surface.


Note: I did not explore Radian6's tools for influencer results and additional keyword drilldowns in this post.

Radian6 screenshots of twitter influencer topical clouds

These screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days.

This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), dave winer, stowe boyd, michael arrington (techcrunch), chris heuer, jeremiah owyang, and brian solis.

(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)

You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, this tells us. These are cloud views, and could be provided by tweetclouds, but I found it handy to be able to lay them side by side, and to be able to flip each window over and change parameters (eg. date range). And they're updated in real time, so they refresh every few minutes or so.

The value proposition here is that influencers influence while talking, and for those of us on twitter, this means talking in 140 character posts. I had to stare at these for half an hour before I began to see things. (my screensaver kicks in at 30 mins. just kidding). You can click the words to read the posts that included them. I started counting how many were in each (this has to be done manually, so it would be great to see a post number on rollover.)

First of all, the tags include any post from the user as well as posts to or in which the user is @named -- so while Dave Winer showed 124 posts for comcast, not all were from him. Likewise, I noticed that Arrington was the only one "reading" -- but it turned out that the term was used in posts in which other twitter users said they were reading techchrunch (not in fact that they were reading arrington's tweets, but techcrunch articles).

With the influencer value proposition still in mind, I tried to read between the lines, or through the gaps, and what struck me first was that in the combination of words shown for each twitterer, one could make out three kinds of conversation: every self-referential talk (apropo the invitation that still begs participation on twitter.com: "What are you doing?"); exchanges with other twitterers; and references to companies, activities, sites (urls).

From stylistic differences in terms that convey everyday experience, you can make out some of the personality of each twitterer. This is even more clear in the 1 and 3 day views than in the 30 day views (yes, that's thirty days -- more than other twitter search clients). These influencers vary in their personability, enthusiasm, self-disclosure, and vary also in how personal or impersonal they come across. Tara comes across as friendly, Jeremiah as professional, arrington as a journalist, brogan as interested. While I follow these folks daily, I purposely did not read their twitter archives -- so that I'd be reading as much from terms shown as possible.

As you close down the time frame, terms that are surfaced shift to the present. No surprise there. Interestingly, heuer maintains a more regular repertoire (see how his terms are fewer and larger). Most influencer show a fairly flat conversation space -- that is, few words really stand out during the 3 day snapshot view. Solis gets credit for "thanks", which stands out and makes sense given what he does -- PR. Solis gives and gets a lot of gratitude. Tara uses the most expressive and emotive terms, suggesting that she tweets more about how she is feeling. Winer clearly had something up with comcast (the heavy throughput problem), and heuer, solis, jeremiah and myself reference "social media" quite a bit -- if one were pushing social media, we'd be good targets as we speak it already.

Down at the one day level, it's easy to see who addresses other twitterers, and is in (public) conversation with them, and who doesn't. One also gets a sense of the day's topics. Solis' topics change significantly between the one and 3 day view. Heuer's remain for the most part the same -- however, he might not have twittered much during the one day time period, and I didn't check.

In moving now from everyday conversation to topical conversation, we can look again for influence. Influencer, influencer on the wall, who's the most influential of them all? These cloud views don't account for reputation score, or use a conversational index (such as suggested by stowe). They account for numbers of follows/followers, and because there's no metric for page view in twitter, don't account for impact.

So the terms, while shown in the same font size, can't give us comparative topical influence. They more simply show us what these influencers tend to talk about. Because tinyurls are captured only as words, and not parsed, we're not able to see what these users have posted links to. But we can see who does post links. Few of the social media company names, applications (facebook and twitter excepted), or buzzwords appear here. That's not surprising, given that these users maintain their own blogs, belong to a high number of social networks, and are regular face to face contact. Much of what surfaces in the social media space, therefore, might not make it into these conversation clouds verbatim.

(What does surface is often in the tinyurl). However, these are just my interpretations. (For example, stowe, deborahcrooks, and I just had a guitar/singing jam session at my place, but the words "jam" "guitar" "session" etc passed below the radar, or were the subject of direct messages. This begs the question of private and public conversations, and a lot of value is passed through back channels.)

Note that a view of influencers in popular TV, movies, dvd rentals, bands, cars, celebrities, etc, might show very different results. Influencers who don't make regular face to face contact should produce more explicit topical references in their twitter conversations. In fact a quick survey of Lost fans and Lost tweets showed a great deal of detail right after last week's (awesome) episode. Lost fans can use a shorthand, insider references to theories, and so on. Highly coded 140 character conversations take an insider's knowledge to understand. While radian6 did surface "OMG," I'm guessing that some social media analysts might have missed "OMG" as a term of extreme enthusiasm and brand affinity (! -- not to mention WTF!!!).

I skipped over my second observation -- references to other twitterers -- because it's fairly straightforward. It would be cool if these were denoted in the tag clouds by use of color. Speaking of color, it would be cool also if rolling over one word would highlight the same word in other profiles. Widgets don't talk to each other, however.

There's one powerful dimension of this that I've not yet brought up, and that's the real-time updates radian6 provides to each window. I could see using this for clients. In fact by keeping lists of topical or domain influencers, together with their blogs, one could provide a client with intra-day monitoring. Each widget can be exported as a graphic or as xml, and emailed from within the application, with notes. This would be perfect for real-time tracking -- say of events, breaking news, product launches, pr, marketing or advertising campaigns.

It would be great to see this with cross references and relationships (a social graph) built in. One might then get a better sense of the overall conversation space. This approach looked at individual influencers -- a topic approach requires setting up widgets by keywords, and results vary immensely by the correlation of search terms to tweets. I'm sure I've missed quite a lot, but this post is already far too long.

Thanks for your attention!


Just some arbitrarily chosen terms, with number of tweets returned for each (written to, by, or citing that user):

user: techcrunch

yes 10
reading 12


user: chrisbrogan

thanks 22
talking 9


user: missrogue

book 9
awesome 10
whuffie 5


user: davewiner

comcast 124 times
thanks 8


user: jowyang

thanks 6
agree 6


user: briansolis

thanks 6


user: stoweboyd

dinner 5
wine 3
tuning 3
interesting 3