Social Media Mapping: The Story Behind the Data

There are many tools available for ascertaining the Who, What and Where of social media, often in the form of a data dump. 

But according to Michael Lieberman, Founder, Multivariate Solutions, companies like Twitter offer data visualization maps that more clearly define all of the attributes of a campaign, hashtag, meme, site or other social phenomena and reveal the story behind the data structure.

Twitter, Google, Yahoo, WhatsApp and Facebook passively cull our personal information via a negative default – that is, requiring the user to opt-out rather than request them to opt-in. This leaves them with a treasure trove of our personal information.

“Social media maps help us visualize the patterns of connection that form when people follow, reply and mention one another in internet communication services like Twitter,” Lieberman explained. The web-like look of these maps show the nature of the conversation whether they are divided, unified, fragmented or clustered.

The use of mapping reveals four types of centrality measures – Degree (how popular), Betweenness (the amount of influence), Closeness (the ability to spread information efficiently) and Eigenvector (how importantly connected) that provide context to social media flow that shows key players and influencers.

According to Lieberman, there are six kinds of Twitter social network maps ——

1-Polarized Map – Using the Egyptian uprising as an example, this map shows two opposing opinions; Feminism and the Uprising (which may not support feminism). Polarized social media discussions have different, often opposing, hashtags.

2-In Groups/Community Map – For a hashtag like #cx (customer experience), these maps show conversations that all use the same or similar hashtags. This indicates the conversation around your hashtag and the penetration of its popularity based on the number of tweets.

3-Bazaar Map – Using @hillaryclinton as an example, the map displays several independent user clusters on many different topics which are not necessarily related to each other.

4-Brand Map – Showcases a public topic such as Disney cruises #disneycruises. These maps show a lot of different groups and hashtags that show what the conversation is around a subject.

5-Broadcast Map – Using @madmagazine or @CNN as an example, these maps show one large group that is essentially talking about same thing. It summarizes what is being shown in the Twitter feed, often stories of the day.

6- Support Maps – Are often corporate maps such as help@dell which has a single originating source that connects directly to many different individual participants.

“The use of a relatively easy analysis such as Social Network Analysis makes understanding the Twitter or Wikipedia conversation far easier than massive social listening platforms,” concluded Lieberman.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Kodi Foster Warns of Living in a Data Echo Chamber

Kodi Foster, SVP Data Strategy, Viacom, is watching the media ecosystem carefully and is seeing some trends that could spell disaster for media companies. His talk at the recent PSFK Conference was a lesson in caution. 

For one thing, he believes that we are marketing to the wrong targets. Further, we may be coming to the wrong conclusions on the data we are capturing because the data itself is skewed, collected in echo chambers of like voices. Tread carefully, he warns, lest you be led astray.

The Internet is Dead

Foster’s company, Viacom, is focused on understanding the current themes of technology and one theme is clear; “The internet is dead,” he began. “But what I really mean by that is that the worldwide web is dead. It is essentially cloud storage and social media. When you really think about it, how many times are you on a dot com nowadays? Maybe Google, but everything else you are doing is on an app.” Or, he added, messaging which is poised to be even bigger than apps in the next year or so. He also believes that surfing the web is “not a thing” anymore and will probably not come back. The overall direction of the internet is decidedly evolving, as with everything else.

Technology Moves Our Cheese

If Foster believes that the tech landscape is changing as people use apps and messaging rather than sites, that leads us down a dark marketing path. According to Foster, “We don’t market to people anymore. We are marketing to the devices that are between us and people. We game theory the algorithms of these technologies so we can get our marketing and content in front of a human being.” Because of this, marketers are actually not trying to understand the human beings. They are trying to understand the biases of these technologies. Foster explained, if you are in marketing, understanding the biases of these technologies has become your job. “Your job is NOT to understand human beings,” he stated. This is leading us down a dangerous analytical path where the data we create every day “is shit” and “when you put shit in you get shit out.”  

Losing Focus in the Echo Chambers of Data

So when you use this bad data to make predictions and craft insights, there is the risk that the outcomes will be wrong. “Machines are not trying to connect people, they are usually promoting something,” Foster added. Promotion is curated. “Who is deciding that curation?” he asked. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy within ecosystems because the algorithms are only putting up only certain things it wants you to see and when you click and engage on it, it reaffirms the algorithm, even if it is not something you wanted to see in the first place.

“Socially connected people tend to be similar,” he posited, so there is the danger of creating “an echo chamber.” When you are fed information and you agree with it, the algorithm will calculate to feed you more of the same. “It’s giving you what it thinks you want because that is the only stuff you are seeing,” he added. This creates a social contagion, especially when it involves false information. This is only starting to come to light but, even now, we may not be fully aware of the ramifications. The data we are gathering and using from this echo chamber may be biased and suspect.

Amplifying Bad Results

The advent and growth of fake news is especially troubling. “We assume, because of these finely structured networks, that everyone within our network believes the same thing that we believe. We assume that the belief is bigger across the world than it actually is and that more people share that belief because the only people we are around believe the same thing,” he warned. That is the danger of social echo chambers.

We may not be taking this war on reality as seriously as we need to, despite the discovery of the privacy transgressions of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. The reliance of the harvested data, collected in stagnant social pools and analyzed without context is leading us down a dark societal path. How can you have an accurate reflection of peoples’ behaviors if the data is not accurate? “What happens to human civilizations when the connected tissue on reality becomes more and more fragmented? How do you create a predictive algorithm for anything when there are tens of thousands of different versions of reality? Whose reality are you predicting?” Foster noted.

Knowing that this is happening and seeing the ramifications leads us to a stark juncture point. Should we just keep calm and continue to play the same marketing game? I believe complacency at this time would be a grave mistake. If we are being led astray now with human-created algorithms, wait until machine learning and artificial intelligence really ramp up in the next few years. Sleep tight, children.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

From Digital to Broadcast Radio. iHeart Media’s Creative Data Initiatives Revealed at the Secret Society

“Data is all about interpretation,” according to Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television. His efforts to progress the discussion and implementation of data in our industry have been a cornerstone of his Secret Society mission. The June 2016 meeting, held at comScore / Rentrak offices, highlighted those data initiatives that pushed the uses of digital data sets and their insights into traditional media platforms. 

It was at that meeting that Brian Kaminsky, President Programmatic and Data Operations, iHeartMedia, revealed how they took digital data, mined it for insights and applied those insights to their broadcast radio viewers to expand knowledge of that group and use it for branding, marketing and sales purposes.

iHeart Media - Digital Data to Broadcast Radio

Kaminsky explained how his company added a digital DMP and ad serving system and used the insights gathered on digital uses to infer the behaviors of their broadcast radio viewers. “With over a quarter of a billion monthly listeners in the U.S. and over 85 million social followers, iHeartMedia has the largest reach of any radio or television outlet in America. It serves over 150 markets through 858 owned radio stations,” he explained. “By leveraging iHeartRadio user database associated with those digital extensions in combination with data from social platform APIs and other third party vendors, our data science team is able to express iHeartRadio terrestrial broadcast station’s audiences with the same type of data and insights normally associated with digital marketing,” he added.   

Kaminsky’s goal was to get people to use broadcast differently by using deeper level of consumer insights from digital. “We needed a DMP to make output actionable and make the consumer come to life,” he said. The result was the creation of data segmentations, the planning against those segments and then used the data to make radio optimizable on a market by market basis. “We also took data, matched it to social behavior, brought in third party data, normalized it and brought it into the iHeartRadio map. We intend to create a series of private marketplaces for iHeartRadio,” he concluded.

Radha Subramanyam, President of Insights, Research and Data Analytics for iHeartMedia, sees great opportunity with this initiative. She said, "It is incredibly exciting when you can deliver the deep insights and precision of digital media with the scale of broadcast media. Advertisers can optimize campaigns against their targets yet reach enough people to truly have an impact. Targeting at scale is the next big leap forward in the application of data."

Conclusion

For Oscar, the opportunity to showcase a range of data initiatives worked not only for the assembled attendees but also for the industry at large. The four presenters at this Secret Society meeting ranged from iHeartRadio (applying the precision, data and insights of digital and social to broadcast) to Sinclair Broadcasting (using programmatic techniques for the delivery of the primary audience guarantee as well as the equally important secondary target)  to 4Cinsights (providing Coca-Cola with a better understanding of how it could reach its unique target) to Roku (demonstrating the value of timely registration information of its OTT/ cord cutting/ cord-nevers growing subscription population). Future meetings will continue to explore the creative use of data for extraordinary targeting capabilities.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

Social Media Sales Conversions. Q&A with Extole's Matt Roche.

Matt Roche, CEO Extole, helps to answer the question of how the social media ecosystem affects sales and conversions in a measureable way.  Extole uses referrals to lead customers through the ad funnel. In this interesting interview, Roche talks about his work at Extole, the social media space as it pertains to sales, the metrics his company has developed to quantify the efficacy of referrals on sales and the concept of the 12^th Man. Roche also offers some of his insights into how the media landscape will evolve over the next few years.

The three videos of the interview are as follows:

Subject                                                 Length (in minutes)

Background and Extole                                  (4:08)

Social Referrals                                                (5:45)

Metrics and Predictions                                 (10:21)

Charlene Weisler interviews Extole CEO Matt Roche who discusses his background and his company in thei 4:08 minute video:

Matt Roche talks to Charlene Weisler about Social Referrals in this 5:45 minute video:

Extole CEO Matt Roche looks ahead in the media landscape and shares his predictions with Charlene Weisler in this 10:21 minute video:

 

Q&A with Stacey Lynn Schulman - TVB

Stacey Lynn Schulman discovered research through college internships. In fact, she is a great proponent of internships as a way for students to explore different career opportunities and to make important contacts for employment after graduation. She launched her career at the rep firm Katz Television, followed by stints at CBS, ad agencies, Turner and ultimately at the TVB where she is CRO. Her responsibilities include supporting the marketing and sales efforts of member television stations across all of their platforms.

In this informative interview Schulman talks about her career, digital mobile, social media, national and local efforts, research trends, big data and what the future might look like for television stations and their multi-platform efforts. And she offers a way to view CBS (and other broadcast networks) that is not impacted by any MVPD contract negotiation.

The six videos of the interview are as follows:

Subject                                                 Length (in minutes)

Background                                                        (7:03)

TVB                                                                   (10:07)

Digital Mobile                                                    (4:05)

Local Digital Efforts                                          (7:50)

Predictions                                                         (5:17)

Good Data vs More Data                                 (6:16)

Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about her background in this 7:03 minute video:

 

Stacey Lynn Schulman talks to Charlene Weisler about the TVB, its mission and projects in this 10:07 minute video:

 

Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about Digital Mobile and its ability to get over the air television anywhere in this 4:05 minute video:

 

CW: It sounds like Digital Mobile gives all Time Warner cable customers access to CBS whether or not it is available on our channel line-up.

SLS: Yes. The important piece about Digital Mobile TV is that consumers do not need to feel victimized by television delivery mechanisms like cable or satellite choices.  They can still receive over-the-air TV stations -- and all of their digital subchannels (some of which aren't being carried currently by cable or satellite providers) -- by purchasing a regular antenna at their local electronics store or by purchasing what we call a "dongle" (a mobile antenna) from Amazon.com.  The dongle connects easily to a cell phone or tablet computer and allows the consumer to view over-the-air television signals, for free, anywhere.  No WIFI required.

 
 

In this 7:50 minute video, Stacey Lynn Schulman talks to Charlene Weisler about local digital efforts by the TVB:

 

Looking ahead in the media landscape, Stacey Lynn Schulman descibes possible new innovations and opportunities for stations. This interview video by Charlene Weisler is 5:15 minutes:

 

In this final video, Charlene Weisler interviews TVB's CRO Stacey Lynn Schulman who talks about Big Data and the conundrum of good data compared to more data in this 6:16 minute video: