Showing posts with label NewMed applications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NewMed applications. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The Conversation - developing a digital strategy part 2


This is the second part of a story which is the synthesis of a number of recent conversations in contributing to thinking of PR strategies.


Mary T who has worked in PR for a generation, the client, represents a number of very talented people entering the realm of internet mediated public relations.

In the first conversation Mary T explained that she suspected that very soon she will be asked to present a plan for her company to rapidly move towards being involved in the wider aspects of online public relations.

We covered some of the aspects that worry a number of organisations only to discover that the organisation had already synthesised many of the issues surrounding digitisation of corporate function over the years. In many respects the issue was of bringing practices uptodate rather then creating new capabilities.

Concerns about outsourcing and passing some control to third parties was put into a wider coporrate strategy context.  

The nature of and implementation of effective internal communication did require some deeper considerations as a consequence of the ubiquity digital communication among employees as well as all other stakeholders.

Mary T’s intern was taking notes and creating a first draft of the Digital Strategy document, Mary would submit to the Board.

In the second conversation, we explored the fundamentals required for approaching the market.

Board Drivers


Mary knew that most of the impetus behind the Board asking for her opinions about the effect of social media on the company was driven by news that online retail sales in the United Kingdom increased 15% year on year in  September 2011. This was worth some £5.5 billion pounds (total retail sales were £31.9 billion). This was in contrast to high street sales which posted a sales increase of a miserly 0.3% according to the British Retail Consortium. The ripple effect throughout the supply chain was not missed on the Board.

The Board had also not missed that  in September 2011 computer information, royalties and license fees showed positive growth (and positive balance of payments)  for nine quarters with turnover growth of £468 million per quarter indicating that  internet based trade was in very positive territory.

Mary, who as a senior PR practitioner was both privy to, and knew only too well that these hard data drive Board thinking.

For a company which  manufactures and licences some manufacturing and sells to wholesale, retail and direct to consumers there is always pressure to focus on where the customers are.

Pretty obviously, the market place now includes an online element. In some instances, the internet has supplanted traditional markets. In other cases, there are new applications for traditional retail and wholesale sales and marketing activities ( Debenhams launched a home catalogue to boost online sales).


Fundamental marketing considerations


In principle, we are aware that selling can be direct to consumer, via a sales agent, retailer, wholesaler, subsidiary company, dealer, distributor. Over the years marketing management had exploited the optimum sales structures. Today, there are a range of regulations that also affect such decisions, not the least EU rules that apply (EU Vertical Agreements Block Exemption Regulation - and accompanying Guidelines).

In addition, there is a need to consider the nature of of Internet Transparency, Porosity and Agency as described by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations/Public Relations Consultants’ Association  Internet Commission (2000) when looking at the optimum sales channels.

To acquire markets and preserve margins there is a need to build trust in the retail chain from producer to consumer and beyond.

With abundant, internet mediated, information about the supply (and value) chain for every form of product and service, much of what an organisation does is evident, even visible to consumers and a very wide range of stakeholders and publics.

There are advantages in organisations being more transparent about products, services and practices. Such policies engender trust and commitment among consumers. Transparency, reports Investor’s Chronicle  is becoming more and more important and also a source of competitive advantage. Supported by a lot of research (from different sources such as Imperial College to PWC), there is significant evidence suggesting strategic adoption of transparency practices is a good thing.

In practice, what this means is that product service and price is discussed by external stakeholders over which the organisation has no control but which is influenced by trusted sources and in turn offers trust across the network.

The inevitable result is that radical transparency (exposing ever more information) has its limitations (see Phillips & Young). and there are consequences. Does the organisation want to expose its supply chain, pricing and other information to all stakeholders including competition? If such information is available will it undermine specification and price differentials that are the lifeblood for success of  agents, dealers, distributors and sales subsidiaries?

Mary could synthesis this into strategy in which the Board would need the company to develop capabilities to explicate procurement, production, distribution and pricing practices to the satisfaction of stakeholders, for example customers, prospects and the people and institutions that influence them, notably online. That is not to say that such considerations need undermine specification considerations or price but they need to be managed for optimum (not maximum) effect. We realise this is quite a complex concept for most managers.

In turn such considerations may affect the sales structure strategies acceptable to both Board and consumer. The public relations recommendation to the Board will invite the marketing managers to take a fundamental approach to the evolution of marketing development based on acceptable levels of transparency to provide volume, margins and an atmosphere among consumers that will engender greater trust.

The transparent organisation

The simple idea that any one and everyone can, but do not necessarily (do they have an issue that creates such interest?),  follow everything that the company is and does online means that the organisation has to make an assumption that every stakeholder and every interested person and group is watching and potentially contributing to company information.

This has significant consequences for the company brand. The brand values given to an organisation spring from what the company represents.

The Vision, Values and Mission of the organisations have to be intellectually honest and clear. If not, with so many potential interested parties and multiplicity of stakeholder agenda’s,  they  will provide an opportunity for third party interpretation leading to diversion and obfuscation.  The Vision, Values and Mission are corporate brand attributes at the heart of every living organisation.

Here Mary could relate to the demands of the marketing managers. They too need this framework for product and brand management.

Marketers instinctively know that  other forms of branding need to be as robust and need to be burnished to ensure that all online (and offline) activity is focused on the single corporate brand concept. Perhaps one needs to go no further than the Forbes article by Jeremiah Owyang, “Greenpeace Vs. Brands: Social Media Attacks To Continue”. It show just how vulnerable organisations can be and the extent to which corporate values need to be thought through.

In addition, with 87% of respondents to a recent survey claiming that positive information they read online has reinforced their decision to buy a product or service that was recommended to them, online reputation is becoming important. Between 2010 and 2011 showed a change in how negative buzz affects consumer buying decisions. In 2011, 80% of respondents (up from 68% in 2010) stated that negative information they read online has made them change their minds about purchasing a product or service that was recommended to them.

The reputation of an organisation online needs to be part of the digital strategy consideration.For the head of public relations this was helpful because it showed the link between reputation and online strategy and why is was so significant.

Organisation are visible in many ways. The shop front pictured in Picasa or Facebook perhaps demonstrates the extent to which traditional and digital are interlocked across so many media. Brand management on and offline needs to be cherished.












The extent to which Board members and employees are exposed online is another consideration. While it is often in the interest of an organisation to enjoy the exposure and public commitment of employees in, lets say, social media such transparency brings with it corporate responsibility to support such employees and their circle from those who would do them harm on and off line as a consequence - forever.

As with people, so too with corporate assets.

This, conceptually, is not new. Organisations have traditionally used security services, some in-house and some contracted, to provide security. Strategically this needs to be extended in the digital age as an element of Corporate Responsibility.


Shop windows


As our discussions develop we discover that there are a lot of touch points for all stakeholders. With so much happening in so many places, it is probably a good idea to think of each as a company shop window, or at least a smart reception.

Of course, on each visit occasion the organisation will want to impress the visitor.

In addition, the company will want to prompt the visitor (or employee) to ‘do something’. In the parlance of the web we are looking for ‘conversion’.

Its a horrid expression based on the need for advertisers to get people to website and ‘convert’ the visit into a sale.

Very few visitors ‘convert’. The best sites only achieve low percentages but it is very importnat for managing interactions with online stakeholders. It forms the basis for evaluation.

For an organisation there may be other forms of ‘conversion’ that are almost as valuable as a sale. A conversion that prompts a prospective employee to apply for job, an investor to buy shares or a vendor to offer great service are all valuable ‘conversions’.

More prosaically, no visit should leave the person contacting the organisation untouched. Here then, is a simple way of describing what digital interactions across the organisation should achieve.

Website


The Website is a key shop window. It is not the only one but it is critical.

It is not just a shop window.It is also the means by which investors, prospective employees, vendors, regulators and many other stakeholders find the organisation. Two publics that may not visit this important location very often are the Board and employees. Just asking around we find that it‘s easy to ignore if you are an insider.

Websites are really important and considerable research as well as expertise is helpful when building them. Creating web sites for a range of stakeholders can be cluttered or complicated or both what is probably more important is that the site is designed for users and not the by the organisation.  There may be user responses that will indicate that more than one website is needed or even optimal. Equally, the organisation may have a lot of sites that have been created over the years and which need to be rationalised. Most organisations have some unloved websites out there that need to be looked at.

There are a number of other sites where there is a need for pro-active design activity. The Facebook page, YouTube Channel and many others will need close attention.

It will come as no surprise to find the company has dozens of presences in LinkedIn and Google+.

Research to find out what is needed on sites, who owns them and what will be effective is important.

For standard web sites there are elements that will  include
  • Usability testing

Test with real users
  • Persona creation

For key audience groups and their goals & needs
  • Eye tracking

Showing what users do & don't look at on your website or marketing emails
  • Card sorting

To help site map structured around the way users think
  • User interviews & contextual enquiry

This provides valuable feed back before going live
  • Focus group research

Is there to maintain the relevance of the website for users and helps ind out what people want from the website & how they want it to work
  • Accessibility testing

To see first-hand the problems blind & disabled users have on your website

Many such considerations apply to thirdparty sites like YouTube.

The cost of building a web site is probably as mach as reception at the corporate headquarters or the flagship store.

Clear and simple navigation is critical but creating websites that are optimised to help search engines prioritise the organisation's site over competition is critical.

In some instances simple aids to search engine optimisation are easy. There is no good reason to have a lot of website real estate devoted to the history of the company and biographies of its senior staff. Much better that it has the imprimatur of Wikipedia and the inlinks that contribute to SEO.

Professional help is going to be needed an the ‘make or buy’ decision here points towards ‘buy’.

eMail


Mary uses email all the time. Morning noon and night her smart phone is firing emails into the ether. It just did  not occur to her that  email could be made much more powerful in building reputation and relationships.

Every manager, employee, supplier, agency, production department, retail outlet, consumer and past customer will use email. An organisation that is really good at using email will enhance its reputation on every contact.

Research, training and structure in the use and application of email will ensure that every employee will be become an ambassador. While there may be TV advertising, or some other block busting method of promotion, at some point most stakeholders will want to resort to email for contact with the organisation. Making the whole experience easy and welcoming affects the bottom line like little else.

Email is also a really big and useful capability to attract stakeholders including prospective customers. Email marketing is a very useful tool.

Email is also one of the top means by which visitors arrive at specific pages on a website.

There is a case for the organisation to schedule time and investment into optimising email for more potent effect.

SEO

The majority of consumers start their product searches at Google (69%) even if they know the URL and are regular visitors. In addition, Google very often provides the location or navigation to the store or off-line consumer required location.

This means that search engine optimisation is a very high priority.

For the public relations person SEO is a wonderland.

To ensure that all content (words, images, video, voice and music) has key values embedded is an absolute must.

Being sure that hyperlinks are added that link back to the organisations web sites is really important and this applies as much to news stories, case studies, application features, references in media features as well as whitepapers and briefing documents.

Indeed, the more of such content is made available of the organisation‘s site, but more significantly the web sites of other organisations.  Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, YouTube, discussion lists and wikis.

They all contribute to the key values of the organisation pointing to its web site and drawing people with values in common or need satisfaction.

Words in content and in context, tags, labels and similar are all part of this process.

As a strategy to be deployed across the organisation in every discourse (yes, even email) this is important and it has to be deployed sensibly. It is possible to be very proscriptive, tiresome and boring. This is actually an opportunity for creative content development to keep values alive, fresh and interesting to both people and Google.

Creating properties to help the process can of many kinds and offer multiple advantages.

A recent research report developed by TriComB2B and the University of Dayton School of Business Administration provides insight into the B2B purchasers’ decision making process.
Key findings from the benchmark report, for B2B search engine marketers to consider, include:
  • Content assets, ranging from B2B blogs through technical data sheets, are critical in the B2B buying process.
  • The source of information was most important in the search and evaluation stages of the decision process.
  • Mobile websites, discussion forums, and blogs are important information sources for purchasing decisions


Online Advertising

Anja Lambrecht at The London Business School has done a lot of very good research including her paper ‘Reaching online consumers: The right ad at the right moment’ which shows that getting the best effect does require both research and dedicated expertise.

Online advertising has many forms and the Internet Advertising Bureau  is  a great place to start to find it.

There is a tendency to imagine that advertising as being about a product or service but such is the nature of the internet that  online advertising can be used in a much more versatile applications.
Taking online users to a case study using advertising seemed strange for Mary’s media officer but the idea that a case study may be shared by the readers, blogged about and mentioned in Twitter and even gather a crowd of followers in Facebook only shows how valuable some online content can be especially as its every iteration may well add to the SEO of the company web site. Advertsing a case study... well yes.

Advertising an app, video or other property may well be valuable.

Strategically, the organisation may now want to consider advertising in a much more flexible light.

They key here is to have objective withing a time period that will deliver the ‘conversions’ for a given amount of effort time and cost (sometimes called, suggested Mary, ROI).


In conclusion


Mary T and her team were itching to get to all that glamorous Social Media stuff but could see that long before we think about a single tweet or post,there are some really important components that need t be in place first.

A great Twitter campaign that delivered users to a rubbish web site would still be a great campaign but would do very little for the reputation of the company or its Board.

Next time in reflecting on the conversations with Mary and her team and the notes here intern is preparing ready for the Board strategy paper we will be able to look at interesting aspects of social media.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

The Home Office finds out the truth about 'Social Media'

The government and police have not sought any new powers to shut social networks, the Home Office said after a meeting with industry representatives, Reports the BBC.


While one may respect the Home Secretary for her political acumen and position in government, her knowledge of the internet, including mobile internet and social media may need some help.

That Facebook, Twitter or RIM can have some material effect on communication affecting a riot is undoubted (these are platforms and channels for communication). That they are  capable of activities that will change behaviours is very doubtful. That she can upset the economy with her tinkering is probable.

In the USA and Europe, and to a lesser extent across the world, £millions has been spent on using the internet to change behaviours by companies such as Wallmart, Exon, Toyota, General Electric and Allianz, the biggest in the world. They have all tried and all failed. They are not the only organisations who have a problem with getting online users to do things.  Google proudly released Wave and dropped it. TouchPad failed because it had few of the apps that made Apple’s iPad a runaway hit. Just 48 days after Microsoft began selling the Kin, a smartphone for the younger set, the company discontinued it because of disappointing sales.

The people in the thick of it are not so good either and the Home Secretary has realised that.

Meantime, economic research tells us:

  • The Internet economy now represents 7.2 percent of U.K. GDP, more than construction, transport, or utilities.
  • The United Kingdom ranks first in e-commerce and exports £2.8 in e-commerce goods and services for every £1 imported
  • There are 250,000 U.K. jobs in Internet companies
  • Small and medium businesses that are high-Web users experience higher growth and more international sales than those that do not use the Internet
  • A recent additional study tells us that sales via the internet are, by themselves, of the order of £62 billion ($103bn)
The Home Secretary also had to consider how many social network outlets there are? The ranges of protocols being used that can be brought into play to avoid censorship (FTP, WWW, Email,etc etc)? The range of platforms in use (PC, Mobile phones, gaming machines etc)?

Her knee jerk reaction to the Prime Minster's elastoplast rhetoric was potentially very damaging and would solve nothing.

It is ironic that a British Home Secretary should attempt shackle the Web, invented by a British scientist  20 years almost to the day from its launch.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Brave new PR

In an exercise with some students we looked at a project in which the PR person was given responsibility for a university open day with the objective of increasing the number of student registration to 110% of capacity.

The university was running at less than 95% so this was quite a challenge.

The rules were simple. No budget constraints and stick to the brief.

Of course we undertook a detailed analysis of the primary publics and their interests and drivers: candidate students, existing students,the faculty etc.

By the time we had students wearing tee shirts with QR codes printed on them, it was obvious that the internal  communication activity was going to be critical.

To get fulsome buy-in from the dominant coalition and starting with the Principles, QR codes were liberally evident outside their offices linked to web sites about achievements, interests and Facebook friends to like selected with salacious care (every lecturer has glamorous Facebook friends - it goes with the territory).

In (classroom tests) it became clear that although the staff was completely oblivious to the secrets of QR codes, the students had no such barriers. Here was a subversive form of communication that was just right for the target audience but also really useful to achieve in-house buy-in (after all when you come out of your office and a bunch of giggling students are pointing phones at the notice boards, even the crustiest academic is curious).

The ideas for the programme, now an interactive university wide exhibition, continued as exemplar courses were given the QR treatment. Film and Vision has a wonderful challenge to use their studio to create YouTube events (inspiration came from here)  for visitors providing attendees with QR codes in hard and soft copy. The stars in the show, academics, students and visitors alike were offered staring roles.

Imagine proposing to a librarian that the PR department wanted to deface books with QR codes converting them into interactive documents incorporate text pictures and video. A deeper richer experience and above all fun. Perhaps even creating Slate books.

Meantime the maths majors were (hypothetically) working on creating a virtual environment about a new form of seminar with the lecturers in class and the students in the bar (sounds credible to me).

A new way of annotation for course work was thought to be a good idea for visitors to the open day.

The whole university was offered help to work on Wikipedia entries with each paragraph having its own QR code with free help from local wikipedians.The resulting codes were photo-shopped into a walk through department exhibition using a really appealing invitation for the young men expected to take an interest

The chemists had a ball developing Avatar presented activities.

Of course all universities need to keep local communities involved and a small team worked on how they could create web presence and interaction between visitors, students and the community and local enterprises. In addition there was a case for creating new ways to stay in touch with school and university alumni.

Having scoped out what was possible, the next major consideration was reaching out to the target audience. Direct contact, involvement with schools, local press, radio and television and, of course the places where young people (and their parents) go. Every new media idea that the class had come up with had a novel, interesting and compelling application for enhancing media relations and extending interest and coverage.

Progressively, this imaginary event  became bigger developing ways that people could interact with the open day exhibitions using Augmented Reality.

The need to be able to use print, email, personal visits, social media, traditional media, shops, clubs and community institutions became significant. Detailed analysis of ways to reach the, now growing range of internal and external publics needed careful analysis. From Twitter to Linkedin, building lists and approaches needed careful planning (and careful risk analysis too). Timetabling the plan was becoming harder.

The wonderful thing about students is that they suddenly come up with a new, and compelling idea.

The idea that so many communication capabilities came from the internet of things inspired by the Corning video brought a whole new range of new communication ideas.

To be able to attract a Corning demonstration, there would be a need to make the open day bigger, requiring wider involvement of the local, and, notably, commercial community.

There are two serious drivers for commerce: incremental sales or, alternatively lower cost.

What, for example would happen if these truly exciting events could extent to the wider community? What self respecting club could resist a QR code enhancement - if only on tee-shirts and wearable transfers, badges, table mats, drinks and even the bands. What is all these electronic gizmo's were all branded to keep promoting the university?  Can the open day become an interactive community interest in shopping malls and, in doing so, increase footfall?

Could visiting prospective students apply for a course using Bump technology? Could a local manufacturer use the new knowledge that the university was acquiring in communication skills for commercial gain? Is mobile phone bump technology helpful in replacing office access passes (Bump payment is now passée) and at the same time a message board on employees phones as part of the process adding internal employee communication to access control. Communication was invading and enhancing ordinary corporate function.

As the conversation progressed, each new application, every new idea offered new and interesting tertiary opportunities to engage a huge range of media from Facebook to YouTube and every news channel going.

By now, a simple open day, a normal PR activity, was becoming an agent for organisational change.

It was creating new and additional motivations for the establishment, lecturers, students and the community.

The kind of thing they would want to do because it is fun.

What we witnessed was where advertising, sales promotion and PR blur into engagement. Relationships that needed careful and structured management to gain the most potent effect.

Congratulations to the creative students at  Escola Superior de Comunicação Social.

Exhausting isn't it?

Image from http://listverse.com/.

Friday, June 03, 2011

The search for hidden meanings

Throughout written history, people have engaged in finding the hidden meaning in writing.

Fascination at the hieroglyphs on the walls ancient Egyptian temples and burial sites extends back well before  4 PM on November 26, 1922 when Howard Carter’s search for hidden meanings resulted in the discovery of the 3300 year old and untouched tomb of 19 years old king Tutankhamun .

Today, we are even more fascinated with exploring our written (and spoken) language.

And it all comes down to what is known as Part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging or POST).

Most of us have done it at school by identifying words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Back when the Beatles were at their peak, America and its allies were embroiled in the Vietnam war, Dr Christiaan Barnard carried out the world's first human heart transplant and The Six Day War was fought in the Middle East, NASA launched an unmanned Apollo 4 test spacecraft and Britons got their first colour television programmes . But in that same year the one development that affects more people today and will do in the future is the work of Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis.  They published their classic work Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967), which provided basic analysis about words in texts on what is known today simply as the Brown Corpus.

Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis did more complicated analysis than getting computers to find nouns and verbs but the principle is the same. It is a process largely based on relationships with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. 

Once performed by hand, POS tagging is now done in the context of the son of the Brown Corpus, computational linguistics. It uses algorithms which associate discrete terms, as well as hidden parts of speech, in accordance with a set of descriptive tags or forms of description or, more recently, that are created as they are found ‘on the fly’.

The reason that Kucera and  Francis work is so important is that we have built a whole new form of society on this idea.

Clever scientists have used this idea of extracting hidden meaning to develop a new form of internet.

One of these ideas came from three academics Scott Deerwester, Susan  Dumais, George Furnas, Thomas Landauer and Richard Harshman (1990). They outlined how to analyse relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. Called Latent semantic Analysis (LSA), the idea assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur close together in text.  

This idea is used by all manner of analysis programmes and helps find those hidden meanings.

In their paper they says “...Thus while LSA’s potential knowledge is surely imperfect, we believe it can offer a close enough approximation to people’s knowledge to underwrite theories and tests of theories of cognition.”  Since 1990, academics have come a long way and accuracy is getting ever closer to social reality. 

Today, the use of semantics makes the Google and Bing web search algorithms more accurate, helps newspaper journalists find the most authoritative sources for information and informs the top companies about events and their drivers to optimise financial, marketing and communication decisions.

Remember Kristen Urbahn’s story I blogged about three weeks ago? It has lots of hidden meanings. Using Extractive.com’s special search engine Kristen can find out about the relationships between different parts of the story (using automated Part of Speech tagging).

The results show the nature of some of the significant words:

PERSON (46)
│├SCREEN ACTOR (4)
││└ Kathy Griffin (4)
  she
││  her 
│├US CABINET MEMBER (1)
││└ Donald Rumsfeld
│├US PRESIDENT (3)
││└ Obama (3)
││  Obama
││  Obama
││  his 
│├ Brian Williams
│├ Dan Pfeiffer
│├ Jill Jackson (2)
  Jill Jackson
│├ Keith (6)
  Keith Urbahn
  He
 │├ Kristen Urbahn (13)
  Kristen Urbahn
   her
  Kristen Urbahn
 
  Kristen 
│├ Maggie Fox
│├ Osama Bin Laden (6)
  Osama Bin Laden
  Bin Laden 
│├ Osama Bin Ladin (5)
  Osama Bin Ladin
  He
  Osama
  he 
│└ Sohaib Athar



LOCATION (14)
│├GPE (13)
││├COUNTRY (5)
│││├ Afghanistan
│││├ Pakistan (2)
│││  Pakistan 

│││└ US (2)
││├CITY (4)
│││├ Abbottabad
│││├ Denver
│││├ Guardian
│││└ San Francisco
││└US STATE (4)
││  Kansas
││  South Carolina
││  Washington (2)
││   Washington
││   Washington 
│└ Wiltshire
ORGANIZATION (21)
│├COMMERCIAL ORG (16)
││├MEDIA ORG (7)
│││├BROADCAST NETWORK (5)
││││└TV NETWORK (5)
││││  BBC
││││  CBS
││││  CNN (2)
││││  NBC
│││├ New York Times
│││└ Washington Times
││├ Defence
││├ Google
││├ Social Media Group

││└ Twitter (5)
││  Twitter 

│├NON GOVERNMENT ORG (2)
││├ Al Qaeda
││└ Republican Leaders Office
│└UNIVERSITY (3)
  Preston University
  University of Kentucky
  Yale
CONTACT INFO (1)
│└URL (1)
 HTTP (1)
  http://goo.gl/qHnFH

OTHER (18)
│├FACILITY (4)
││└BUILDING (4)
││  White House (4)
││   White House Communication Director
││   White House 

│├LINKED OTHER (11)
││├ Capitol Hill
││├ Christian
││├ Creative Commons
││├ Dachshunds
││├ Internet
││├ Internet
││├ Mobile
││├ POTUS
││├ President Obama
││├ Royal Wedding
││└ The New York Times
│└SOFTWARE (3)
  Facebook (3)
   Facebook 

DATE-TIME (16)
│├DATE GENERAL (8)
││├DATE (2)
│││├ Aug. 18, 2009
│││└ May 1 2011
││├DAY OF MONTH (1)
│││└ 1 May
││├MONTH NAME (1)
│││└ May
││├RELATIVE DATE (2)
│││├ months ago
│││└ the evening
││└YEAR (2)
││  2006
││  2011

│└TIME (8)
  10:30 p.m. Eastern Time
  10:40 p.m.
  10:53
  11 p.m.
  11:35
  4pm EST
  9:45 p.m.
  from 10:45 p.m.-2:20 a.m.
NUMERIC (20)
 MEASUREMENT (4)
 │└DURATION (4)
   Five years
 
  days
 
  former
 
  the hours
 NUMBER (11)
 │├ 2.0
 
│├ 3,000
 
│├ 5,000
 
│├ 7.24
 
│├ millions
 
│├ more than 185
 
│├ one
 
│├ one
 
│├ six
 
│├ three
 
│└ two
 ORDINAL (5)
   Third
  
 first
  
 first
  
 second
  
 third


Here, then, are the key elements that can be extracted from the blog post.

Two people from the 18th and 19th centuries now star in this story.

Thomas Bayes (1702–1761) was the son of London Presbyterian minister with a clever mathematical brain. He came up with what can be described as a way to look at these hidden parts of text and other content and find out the extent to which a particular inference is not true. For example Twitter is a big part of the Kristen Urbahn story but it is by no means the focus of the events in Pakistan.  It was just an (important) means by which information was shared across the globe. Thomas’ clever mathematics is the means by which it is possible for computers to make decisions about the probability that information can be relied on and, in that case, the role of Twitter in news distribution.

With enough information and generous computing power, of which modern man has plenty, Bayesian probability offers something like a partial belief, rather than a frequency. This allows the application of probability to all sorts of propositions rather than just ones that come with a known structure. "Bayesian" has been used in this sense since about 1950. Advancements in computing technology have allowed scientists from many disciplines to pair traditional Bayesian statistics with other techniques to greatly increase the use of Bayes theorem in science. Now, computers can both learn from experience and are beginning to be good at prediction.

Twitter was important for the Urbahn story and so, the software might tell us, Twitter will be significant for other stories in the future.

It is such techniques that modern managers need to hand if only to be able to discover emerging trends in communication and or news and events.

Fifty years after Thomas death, George Boole  (1815 – 1864) came into this world to give us all a great way of discovering information.  George (who was married to an equally mathematically brilliant wife Mary and who was the nice of the man who gave Mount Everest its name), gave us Boolean algebra (1854). Today most people know it because it is useful when searching for information using search engines. The Boolean operations AND, OR, and NOT help narrow down searches to get more closely to the facts we seek (Kristen AND Urbahn OR Forcht).

But, the use of AND, OR, and NOT in mathematics and computing has other applications and when combined with Bayesian probability (and other similar math) which means that computers can be used to make accurate, predictive and related inferences and learn, for themselves, from the results.

In practice, we find useful tools to give us insights into events.

For example http://twitris.knoesis.org/  (created at Kno.e.sis at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Wright State University) provides us with an ontology, related Tweets, links to highly relevant web pages, a chart of Tweet rates and much more.


In practice, a manager can keep a close eye on mentions of a company, brand or product and the reputation drivers behind the Twitter stream.

No one is pretending that business managers need to understand all the technologies. There is a need, however, to know that using such advances is now becoming central to modern management and communication.


Bibliography
Kucera, H. and Francis, W.N. (1967) Computational Analysis of Present-day American English Journal: Neuroimage - NEUROIMAGE
Scott Deerwester, Susan T. Dumais, George W. Furnas, Thomas K. Landauer, Richard Harshman (1990). "Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis". Journal of the American Society for Information Science 41 (6): 391–407
 Boole, George (2003) [1854]. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-089-9.
Gruber, Thomas R. (June 1993). "A translation approach to portable ontology Specifications". Knowledge Acquisition5 (2): 199–220.


Further Reading:
Introduction to LSA http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/dp1.LSAintro.pdf
Semantic Inference in the Human-Machine Communication http://www.springerlink.com/content/ju71rcn9pq0wcmy3/
Continuous Semantics to Analyze Real-Time Data http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Continuous_Semantics_to_Analyze_Real_Time_Data
Web semantics and ontology By Johanna Wenny Rahayu http://books.google.com/books?id=K7yFJVu8NDYC


Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more sources come through Gnip's API, normalized and enriched with metadata. http://gnip.com/