Language Use in Digital Diplomacy Via Social Media

In our research projects in the use of social media in Public Diplomacy and Digital Diplomacy, we’ve noted some interesting aspects around what language people will use in their primary communications. This is important, as what language is being used in a social media channel can be a prime indicator of “who” a message or communication is aimed at. For example, with the Syria crisis ongoing an in the Egypt crisis of 2011, we would see abrupt changes in the primary language used, especially in video content, between Arabic and English. In 87% of the videos analysed on video channels such as YouTube and Vimeo relating to the Syria crisis, English was used, especially in narrated videos. If the intent of the authors was to reach an Arabic audience, they would use Arabic, but instead used English. A similar pattern evolved with the Egypt crisis of 2o11. We’ve noted similar patterns in the Sudan and Haiti.

English is the primary language used online and certainly the main language an organisation would use to gain the attention of western news media and governments. When tagging videos, blog posts or images and using hashtags on Twitter, these are predominantly English. Also keeping in mind that the top social media channels such as Twitter, blogging platforms or YouTube are Western tools delivered mostly in English.

Digital diplomacy is not just the bane of governments, it is a powerful soft power tool used by well organised non-state actors and ad-hoc groups to gain attention from not just western governments and news media, but from the general population and perhaps diaspora communities where the originating native tongue is not spoken as much; such as with third generation diaspora. Understanding language usage can be an important element of defining primary and secondary messages to various audiences. As more governments and state/non-state actors engage in these back-channel public diplomacy tactics, new subtleties and dynamics will begin to emerge in the world of digital diplomacy.

Top Caribbean Countries for Social Media

Following our 2011 internal research into how social media is used in the Caribbean, it remains a growing community when it comes to social media. Our latest review of the region was to look at which countries within the CARICOM region were the most active in social media. Our surprise was that Haiti continues to lead the way as a percent of overall engagement. We reviewed top Caribbean social networks, over 4,000 blogs, 2,500 Twitter accounts and other channels. Haiti kept popping up as a leading country – despite the state of the country in its reconstruction phase and costs of Internet access on a per Mb basis.

Cuba was a surprise for the level of engagement overall, but Cubans rarely if ever discuss political issues unless it is Cuban diaspora. We did not count for diaspora living outside the Caribbean in this study. Behind Haiti comes Trinidad & Tobago followed by Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Our next study will look more at what each of these countries people are doing in social media channels as a follow-up to our previous work. The analysis period ran from January 1st 2012 to March 15th inclusive and total volumes of usage were adjusted for populations. We also assessed costs of Internet access in each of the countries for dial-up, broadband and wireless data networks.

How Men & Women Deal With Content in Social Media

With the rapid and almost surprising rise of content curation or “social bookmarking 3.0″ site Pinterest, we wanted to take a deeper look into just how men and women curate their digital content. This represented a challenge, as we don’t use surveys to ask these kinds of questions, we passively collect and analyse information and turn it into “intelligence” – you see, it’s intelligence we use to make decisions, not information (as stated by JFK.) The methodology we used is below if you’re interested. Our sample size was 250 men and 250 women; treated as blinds in aggregate, no personal information was collected/analysed.

Women & Content Curation in Social Media
Women are “gatherers” and to some degree “hoarders” of digital content. But while they collect more content online, they are also more organised with their content and tend to share across a broader network. Women also collect more text content than men, such as blog posts. Women discuss societal issues (laws, education and healthcare etc.) about 20% more than men. Men, however, discuss politics 24% more than women. Women “tag” content more than men as well; part of their being better organised on content curation. When it comes to discussing technology such as apps or devices, women will focus on the benefits.

Men & Content Curation in Social Media
Men are haphazard collectors of content. They prefer video and images and rarely tend to share text information. Men don’t collect and organise content as much as women either. There is also a tendency to “one-up” each other in groups by sharing content that would be seen as being “better”, as in funnier or more interesting than the last piece of content shared. Men also tend to share “humorous” content more than any other kind, preferably video format. For men when it comes to discussing technology such as as apps or devices, they will debate the features over the benefits, including price. Men also share less across networks they aren’t as familiar with, whereas women are more open and social in new apps.

Similarities
As we’ve seen in general trend analysis, the preferred forms of content to be created and shared and also curated it turns out, is video and images. Text is still common, but less of it. We’ve seen the average blog post dwindle from 800 words in 2009 down to less than 300 in 2012. Both men and women prefer video and image. And when it comes to ranting or opinion-making on news sites, we see both men and women almost equally sharing their views. Both men and women tend to curate more content on sites that are easiest to use, such as Pinterest or Storify, perhaps in part explaining their success. We also found that women would recommend an online app or tool 40% more often than men. But men would recommend technology devices more than women by 15%.

Some Conclusions
For apps designers and developers – keep thinking ease of use. For marketers, women remain in Cyburbia as they tend to in the real-world, the best networkers and the ideal target to drive popularity of general consumer apps and products. Women return to and keep content (in social bookmarking sites, social networks etc.) more than men and are far more organised overall.

Methodology
To do this, we looked the profiles of 250 men and 250 women who had active (engaging in each platform at least three times per week) publicly available profiles in sites such as Pinterest, Gentlemint, Delicious, Google+, Storify, Cowbird and Twitter. We also looked at 50 open Facebook groups where 25 had predominantly male membership and 25 with predominantly female members (over 98%.) We then ensured they were within the age bracket of 30-45 using our methodology for doing this (which is proprietary to us but has a 87% accuracy rate.) We also ensured a cultural distribution across Caucasian, African American/Canadian and Asian ethnic groups. Profiles were random across the United States, UK and Canada. We did not collect any information from profiles that were not publicly available. We do not collect names or locations of test profiles, no such data is retained on our servers at any time. Names may be reviewed as part of gender validation only, but are not kept or stored in any form after analysis and verification. None of the information is re-sold to a third party unless it is in aggregate form.

Posted By: Davis for the team which included almost all of us and a lot of debate and statistical fights in which the CEO often left to get “coffee”….

The Longtail Value of Twitter & Social Media

We recently posted a quick synopsis of our analysis of Twitter location data via hashtags on our blog. It’s had a fair bit of traffic to say the least. But what struck our team as interesting was a comment on our post by someone who said, essentially “why would a business care about tweets more than a week old?” Good question and a hat tip to Mr. Borasky for inspiring us – sparked some good debate at the office. There is, in fact, a lot of value. Even Twitter realizes the value to the point where it sells old “tweets” to businesses. Heres some of the value of historical social media content…one we’ve recognised for three years now given our public policy research and brand analysis work. Nice to know we remain ahead of the curve.

The Value of Old Tweets:
Due to the proprietary nature of what we do (hey, our business is digging far deeper into social media than basic monitoring tools do) we’ll cover some of the main reasons only. Sorry about that, but we are a business after all and people rely on us for their mortgage payments etc.
- Past tweets can give indicators of something going “viral” in a marketing campaign
- Past tweets can lead to where something went viral and point to “authorities” and “influencers” for marketing outreach
- In public policy it can help governments understand how citizen views shape around proposed or passed legislation
- A company can understand how a PR crisis evolved and where content originated when doing debriefs

Value of Historical Social Media Content for Brands:
Case 1: In 2009 we conducted an online brand analysis for Anne of Green Gables for TourismPEI (a very sophisticated tourism department I might add) and we found, in the deep dark corners of the web (where reputation management tools don’t ever go) some Anne content from 1985. Trending that forward, TourismPEI gained some unique and critical insight into the Anne brand through time. It helped them develop a very engaging social media campaign with financial benefits to tourism operators in PEI. We could cite about 80 other examples, but that would be a longer blog post than we want to write or anyone wants to read.

Case 2: A large software manufacturer came to us to see if we could help them understand what people were saying about certain product features – for recent and old releases. As they used the Agile Development process (like we do) they wanted to identify any trends, including those of competitors. We were able to show them how competitors had sidestepped them for a lead on three occasions in 2005 and 2007 and help them identify where a release went wrong in 2009. To say this made them ecstatic would underplay the very large fruit basket that got shared around the office…what? If we sent it back the fruit would have decayed. Bad for the environment.

Value of Old Social Media Content for Public Policy
Case 1: One interesting case is research into the aquaculture industry for a provincial government in Canada. What our research into social media showed was how citizens viewed legislations and industry approaches from 2002 to 2010. That’s a good window to understand the evolution of citizen and activist group approaches to public policy.

Case 2: This case came out of the UK and the UK government looking to understand the views of farmers and citizens around Farm Trust policies in the UK from 2000 to 2010. Our research was combined with traditional survey and polling methods and showed some more detailed opinions by citizens and farmers than would have ever shown up in traditional methods.

Case 3: This was about saving lives. It doesn’t get better than that. Our research was around a flood event in New Brunswick in 2010. Our analysis was carried out in mid-2011. Access to historical data was vital. We were able to create a detailed picture on how social media was used by citizens just before, during and after a major natural disaster that would help the provinces Emergency Measures Organisation and services respond better and engage citizens.

Immediacy Means Lost Context
Those who focus on the “real-time” of content online are working in the “now” and there is definitely a place for that. That’s where social media monitoring tools like Radian6, Sysomos or Trackur come into play (although they all fail on the “small” and only work for major volumes of discussion.)  But as we’ve shown above, getting an historical view of what’s happened can be the difference between adapting to an emerging trend and repeating a disaster in both marketing and public policy.

Even in this modern age, history repeats itself.

Where Twitter Apps Fail Miserably

There are a number of Social Media Engagement apps on the market, such as Hootsuite, Siesmic and TweetDeck. They all offer pretty much the same capabilities with Radian6 offering “nice dashboards” to help you, apparently, understand sentiment etc. So we tested Hootsuite, Seesmic and TweetDeck and here’s what we found…their ability to “search” and then actually find users was surprisingly limiting. In part this may be largely due to the cost of the feeds they buy. It costs upwards of US$30,000 a month to get real-time feeds from Twitter and other sources. While storage may be cheap, processing and bandwidth remain expensive.

Methodology: For all of the above tools we used 20 different account profiles with each service. We then identified 50 different Twitter accounts with a range of 30 to 5,000 followers and 20 of the top trending hashtags over a 5 day period. We also used some localisation hashtags including #Halifax, #Calgary, #Toronto, #SanFrancisco, #Chicago, #London, #Liverpool and #Boston to get an international sense of tweets.

Hootsuite: We found that Hootsuite failed to identify known Twitter accounts 46% of the time and didn’t register hashtags 39% of the time with a 3 month window.

TweetDeck: With this app we found TweetDeck failed to identify known Twitter accounts 54% of the time and didn’t register hashtags 76% of the time with a 3 month window.

Seesmic: Was the worst with failing to to identify known Twitter accounts 76% of the time and didn’t register hashtags 82% of the time with a 3 month window.

So What? You Could be Wasting Serious Money:
Well, if you’re using these apps, it means that on a mean average, you will only find 22% of the accounts talking about your brand, service or issue. That means that “keyword” analytics are nice, but are weak and have a long way to go. The fact is, human oversight and integrating third party tools along with more sophisticated software is what makes the difference. These tools that enable digital engagement and also known as “social media monitoring” apps are okay for major brand keywords but can fail when it comes to hyper-local or evolving results.