Category Archives: Public Policy

Social Media and the Mining Industry: Impact?

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Is social media commentary going to change the way mining companies around the world do business?  Can industry participating in a blog or forum discussions affect their bottom line or share pricing?  These are just some of the questions today’s mining companies need to answer. Fortunately, we’ve done some research.

A recent quick and simple study MediaBadger conducted on Canadian mining companies in three Latin American countries brought > 4,000,000 hits of Spanish-language data over three months.  The majority of the blogs and forums were posted by social/political and environmental activists opposing mining activities  (often connected by international networks). Supporters of the mining sector were sparsely represented. As a mining company in one of these countries, would you want to know what is being said?

Only 18 months ago a study undertaken by IBM(“From Stretched to Strengthened, Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study”), identified that most of more than 1,700 CMO’s interviewed world- and industry-wide felt unprepared to deal with the impact of key changes in the marketing arena. Three of the “most pervasive and universal game-changing challenges they reported were:

·      The data explosion
·      Social media
-     Proliferation of channels and devices.

MediaBadger’s information and research tells us that more people and companies are increasingly becoming aware of the advantages of utilising the social media.   Many people, however, still feel “deaf, dumb and blind” –  as a colleague recently pointed out – when it comes to understanding and mastering the intricacies of the ‘web’.

Our experience also confirms the impacts of social media on their business still mystify not only many CEOs but also other senior management in the mining sector, trying to understand opinions, social trends, and market currents relating to industry. Awareness of who is supportive, who is critical, why people hold these positions and where they are located are fundamental issues when creating policy, undertaking  community or stakeholder outreach, developing public education, when defining Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes, or when trying to build a strong and positive corporate image.

Download our most recent mining sector and social media impacts newsletter Here: Winter2013-Mining-Badger

Current stats indicate that more than half of the world’s 2.4 billion Internet users sign in to a social network regularly.  These stats indicate that during 2012 internet users numbered:

North America          273,785,413
Africa                       165,335,676
Latin America          254,915, 745
Asia                         1,076,681,059

 Of all these internet users it is estimated that 63.2% visited a social network at least once a month in 2012. That number is expected to increase to 70.7% in 2014. With all of these people chatting online globally – what have you been missing?

Do you know the difference between the myriad of social media channels, apps and services available online – which will best suit your needs and which are the most widely used in specific regions of the world?  Are you tuned in to the ever increasing possibilities of Weibo, Reddit, Ameba, Linkedin or Odnoklassniki?  Or do you need some help navigating the web?

Manage the data, know the channels and understand the message
MediaBadger can get beyond the ‘quantity’ of  data with its proprietary technology and knowledge of the intricacies of the web channels and devices – far beyond what consumer social media monitoring tools can do.  Our expert analysts can make this vast amount of data understandable so you and your company can use it and be responsive to the needs and wishes of your clients and stakeholders.

A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly points out that “The value of social media is the trust created through real people engaging in authentic dialogue.”  ( The Atlantic). Understand what these real people think by tuning in to social media.

 (Contributing Authors: S. Soux, M. McKinnon, A. Colson)

Stealing Business Secrets Via Social Media

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Your IT department is constantly dealing with securing the corporate network. Protecting your infrastructure from malware, viruses, phishing attacks and hacks. But there’s a slightly more ominous threat to corporate secrets, taken from the old school world of industrial espionage. This is about using good old fashioned human to human connections – only via social media channels. And it’s very likely your employees don’t have a clue. In the past year we’ve completed client work finding strong indicators corporate information is being leaked in this way. Here we hope to provide some insights, naturally we can share all our methodologies, nor can we share the clients we’ve worked with in this regard.

General Techniques for Espionage via Social Media
There are several key tactics that are used  by both foreign governments and competitor companies to gain access to corporate secrets.

Cut-Outs: This is where a government or corporation hires a third-party agent to conduct the work. It may be an existing supplier or representative agent.

Direct Handler: This is when a government or corporation uses one of their own directly to engage an employee and get what they’re looking for.

Compromised Employee: A disgruntled worker or one that has a vendetta on their mind. As they share their frustrations with the company via social media, a government or competitor can find them and begin the recruiting process. For the aggressor, these employees who have vengeance on their mind can be golden – and a lot cheaper as they may give information out of spite alone.

Digital Honey Trap: One of the oldest tactics, and still most effective. The target is engaged with a member of the same/opposite sex, depending on preferences, and the courtship begins…call it “virtual pillow talk” perhaps?

How They Go About It:
In most instances, aside from having a paid internal spy stealing your corporate secrets, the methods used are much the same as traditional espionage tactics. A handler or cut-out will attempt to befriend an employee through social media channels. One method is to find out a particular hobby of the target (golfing for example) then begin to foster the relationship with the target in a forum for golfers or Facebook group. All innocent enough. Over time, a relationship is built. You can see where it goes from there.

What Are They Stealing?
This can range from sales figures for market information, upcoming product launches, issues with products (to exploit in counter-marketing), information on board members that can be used for blackmail…and of course proprietary secrets about a product.

Foreign Governments & Corporations
Increasingly, countries such as China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Argentina…are all in this game. They are targeting Western businesses to help them improve their competitive position and to block Western countries by launching their own products to “own” their domestic market. There are global economic reasons as well. As we are so interconnected today, a competitor may learn where your components are manufactured in China or Taiwan and then attempt to cause supply interruptions or infiltrate the facility to damage production creating shipping delays.

The reasons and ways such intelligence is used are wide ranging. Developing nations understand how to leverage these new tools and exploit them. Companies in the developing nations who do not understand this are already losing market value. Western companies today have to compete against increasingly aggressive smaller market competitors. Corporations today should create awareness of such tactics to staff or in planning their risk assessments for corporate information security.

Health Professionals in Social Media Study

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We’ve done a fair bit of research for clients in the healthcare sector and one of the first questions asked by clients is “does anyone in healthcare actually use social media?” When we ask them if they use it at all, they often respond that they do themselves. It’s an odd disconnect. So we decided to look back at our data plus do some additional digging. Turns out, a lot of healthcare professionals are engaged. And not just for entertainment. Increasingly, they are using social media to connect professionally, to learn and share insights about their work (not patients.) For makers of medical equipment, pharmaceutical companies and any other supplier; this is a marketing and learning opportunity. Take note. This is just a summary of our research by the way. This research combines data from Canada, the United States and United Kingdom.

Which Profession is Engaged The Most?
The chart below provides a ranking of engagement by the professions that we found to be the most active (methodology at end of post.) By “engaged” we mean professions that identify themselves or through the specific social media channels they use. It means being active at least twice a month. What was interesting? Paramedics top the list, followed by lab techs and nurses…but med students are increasingly engaged and now on a par with nurses. Technicians are classed as x-ray, CAT-scan and similar. That might suggest that the next group of doctors and specialists coming up are going to be very engaged with these technologies. That means business opportunities. It also means educational opportunities and a suggestion that as these professions learn from each other, best practices could be improved….maybe with better outcomes for patients? That would take some more research, but we suggest it may be possible.

What Social Media Channels Do Healthcare Professionals Use?
It’s one thing to know they’re engaged. It’s another to know what tools they are using and that is telling in itself. It’s not Facebook either. The two most popular channels are forums and niche social networks (these niche SN’s are like Facebook, but are focused on one topic or industry sector, unlike Facebook which is open to anyone.) It is interesting that forums remain a key channel for engagement, as forums are older forms of social media that have been around since the late 1980′s with the old bulletin boards…and haven’t really evolved much since the late 1990′s. Microblogs such as Twitter or Identi.ca are used, but they tend to be more about general topics or sharing links toi relevant content, not detailed discussions about their profession; likely due to the limitation of 140 characters….which is not conducive to long medical terms by any stretch.

What About Patient Privacy?
Patient confidentiality in social media is always a hot topic and there have been a few people fired for revealing confidential patient information. From what we’ve been able to determine however, patient names are never mentioned and privacy is a concern – seems people in healthcare got that message loud and clear.

So Why Does This Matter?
As we suggested at the start of this blog post; sharing insights and experiences could play a role in improving patient care and treatments, although that would need a more empirical analysis. But it shows that people in the healthcare sector are engaged in social media and that they’re engaging on issues relating to their profession and that means opportunities for businesses to engage and for the healthcare education sector to learn and improve their offerings to the profession.

Methodology Notes
All information that we collect online is from public sources. We do not, ever, collect or analyse private information. Ever. We collect these data using our proprietary web crawler and some third party tools. The data is then analysed using our proprietary text analytics software that assesses such information as age groupings, education levels and geographic areas – again, all public. We also conduct manual verification and use statistical modelling to prepare our final results. In this instance the data was collected from the USA, Canada and UK. Sample size was 3,500 individual public accounts from each of the top professions. We determined the professions by analysis across all popular and less-known (but public) social media channels in the three countries. We collected and examined 35,000 “tweets” and Identi.ca postings from January 2010 to end of December 2012. The same date considerations were given for other channels. Data that was then cleaned for verification and analysis was assigned a weighting for size of profession and per capita populations in each country. Our ranking methodology is proprietary; the higher the number the more “engaged” or used.

More Data Please?
We’re a business. We have salaries to pay and costs to cover, including the bandwidth to collect the data, the storage space for that data and the processing costs. So we release what we can publicly and if an organisation wants further insights, we would be happy to provide a quotation to deliver that intelligence.  We can customise the data as you would like as well. See our contact page for details on how to get in touch.

Disinformation Warfare via Social Media

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Psychological warfare (PsyOps) has long been the domain of militaries around the world for decades. Now, these tactics are becoming the domain of radical activist groups and in some cases governments in the world of digital diplomacy. We are entering a new age of “disinformation warfare” where people and organisations are learning how to create “perceptions” and misdirect people, governments, law enforcement and corporations. This is the new asymmetrical communications environment. And it is going to make life a little bit more challenging.

Government & Stakeholder Relations Case Study
A couple of years ago a client’s PR agency contacted us based on some comments in a print news media article. They wanted us to look at social media and online channels to see if anything was being said about their client online. Their client was attempting to get legislation changed in their favour (they are in the extractive resources sector.) Within an hour we discovered that the eco group they’d been working with was creating false content opposing them through online channels. From doctored pictures to falsely edited videos and suspicious seeded news media comments, their supposed ally was working to defeat them. It was quite an eye opener for this client.

This is Not The Domain of Multinationals Either
If you’re reading this thinking that this only happens to multinational corporations (MNC’s) or global affairs, think again. It can be happening in your State or Province, city or town. Often times, individuals or organisations may not even realise they are conducting Disinformation Warfare tactics, but they are. In the marketing world, it might be referred to as online reputation management. But it goes beyond that to government relations, legislative issues, municipal elections or referendums.

The Battle of Perceptions
In political communications there are two key terms; 1) astroturfing and 2) sockpuppeting. Both are designed to alter perceptions to show support or opposition. This is done through manipulation of content whether it be text, audio, images or video. Usually, the manipulation is quite subtle and  untraceable (at least when it comes to sockpuppeting.)

The Trust Mechanism of Reliable Sources
People tend to trust the views and opinions of friends and family first. In marketing terms, research has shown that 76% of people trust a product recommendation from a friend than an advertisement. This translates beyond marketing into every day life. We trust our friends, family and close circles more. This relates directly in social media. If we see content posted by friends and family in our trusted networks, then it is highly likely we will trust that content. This is somewhat anecdotal, but we have enough research case studies to be a strong indicator that this is so.

Playing on Trust Mechanisms
It is these trust mechanisms that clever communicators (political parties, religious groups, activist groups, rogue governments etc.) understand very well. The objective is to manipulate peoples perceptions, in small and large part. Sowing a seed of doubt is the basic objective.

Is It Disinformation Warfare that Prevalent? Do You Really Need to Care?
This kind of activity can be very subtle. For many traditional businesses such as waste disposal, mining, local manufacturing, pulp companies…the results are what speak for themselves. Unfortunately we’ve done the post-mortem analysis for a number of traditional sector businesses and governments that show them after the fact what happened in social media. How perceptions were changed and when. It is an uncomfortable reality. Here is a website that helps organisations learn misinformation tactics as an example.

The Upside of Opportunity
In some cases however, we’re able to show clients what is happening early enough. They can then take actions to turn a negative into an opportunity. But it is a risk to businesses and governments that needs to be not just in the marketing teams realm, but that of stakeholder relations, the C-Suite and policy makers within government.

Social Media Use in Atlantic Canada Report #5

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We are pleased to be releasing today on our blog, the 5th annual Atlantic Conversations, a report on social media usage in Atlantic Canada that is relevant to government, corporations and other organisations engaging in social media. While the report is based around Atlantic Canada, it is often relevant to other parts of Canada and the United States.

Download Here (PDF format): Atlantic Convo5-Badger2012.

Report Dedicated To: PeaceGeeks, a non-profit that brings technical savvy to grassroots organisations in developing nations, help them leverage the advantages of technology.

Highlights of the Report:

Social media isn’t just about entertainment: In 2012, we saw the most significant shift in use of social media by citizens to discussion on citizens issues. In the past year, political and local issues featured prominently in the discussions and anyone who thinks it’s just kids using these tools might be very surprised.

Google+ Is Growing: For many, the assumption was Google+ was either dead or just the domain of the techies. That certainly isn’t the case. We were surprised how fast Google+ grew in the region. For many, Google+ is seen as having better privacy rules and people prefer the “information flow” over that of Facebook.

Business & Social Networking: The fastest growing social network tool in the region was LinkedIn, mostly the domain of professionals. The increase in usage was significant at well over 60% including usage of discussion groups and company pages. Clearly, the regions professionals are finding the value in this business networking tool.

Provincial Growth in Social Media Use: Newfoundland Labrador saw the most significant growth in social media use in the region, followed by PEI. This is significant in that it shows adoption of these tools across the region is far beyond just youth as the 35+ demographic is increasingly engaged.

Download the free version to find out more. The complete version is available for sale at $995. plus tax, just send us an email or give us a ring. The full version will be available on January 30th, 2013.