Influence Competitors: The New Corporate Threat

A whole new scale of threat has evolved for corporations, and governments as well, in the court of public opinion. We call them Influence Competitors, some have called them Irregular Competitors. Regardless, these competitors are looking to influence the views and opinions of the same market businesses and governments may be looking to influence. Only they’re opposed to your views.

The way citizens and consumers receive, consume and share information today is highly complex, fast and easily spread to their own networks. Every person has a network of people that they have influence over, just as companies, governments and other organisations do, from markets to the general public. Today, it is very easy to influence people. It is also very hard to influence people. The biggest Influence Competitors that pose a threat to corporations and sometimes governments are activist groups. Non-Government Organisations and Non-Profits who target the practices of corporations they disagree with and government policy attempts or legislative moves they feel threaten their agenda or audience. Sometimes, competing companies will align with Influence Competitors as well, providing an entirely new dynamic to a company’s competitive landscape. At other times, activist groups will work with opposing political parties to the one in power, again adding a new dynamic.

Influence Competitors leverage social media as their primary tools with industrial news media used mainly to drive the message to social media where the battle for influence really begins. In industrial news media, an NGO may only get 3 minutes tops in the news cycle and then for only limited periods. Once they have eyeballs online, compelling content is used through video, images, text and sound to deliver sophisticated messaging and even encourages dialogue.

The Confidence Factor
Once an Influence Competitor has developed online dialogue through social media services and an audience has grown, it’s influence grows and they may then become an Authority Competitor. When citizens or consumers see others engaged in dialogue, actively contributing and adding content, this provides individuals with a sense of confidence – that others are committed to the cause. This creates the authority of the organisation (you might call it crowdsourcing your citizen activists) and it becomes increasingly difficult to unseat an Authority Competitor. Corporations or governments that don’t respond, or offer very little response, quickly lose influence share and citizens then take action.

So What? Why Does Citizens Shouting On Facebook Even Matter?
It’s easy to think they don’t. It’s easy to shrug off people venting on Twitter or blog posts and Facebook group pages. The reality is, it does matter and it has a very tangible, measurable and direct impact. The real-world results are phone calls, emails and letters to Senators, Members of Parliament, Congressional Representatives, industrial news media. Petitions go round. Protests happen. Sometimes, employees are attacked or facilities burned down or otherwise damaged. Or in the case of London, riots occur. Social media tools go from driving the idea to then being used for organising direct real-world activities.

Understanding Influence Competitor Threats
No social media monitoring tool will help. They may tell only part of the story and they’re not good warning indicators. What’s needed is a deep analysis into the lead Influence Competitor social graph, their connections, size of community, past campaigns and outcomes, current activities and more. Monitoring tools play a part, but analysis and insight from industry specialists, anthropologists, sociologists and law enforcement adds an unparalleled level of insight. Once this is known, then a strategy can be used.

Mobile Will Increase The Threat Level
As more and more citizens use SmartPhones and tablets like the iPad to participate in social media services, the threat from Influence Competitors will only increase. With the ability to live-stream video and instantly upload photo’s integrated with real-time services like Twitter, the challenge to monitor and then dig deep into the issues will become increasingly difficult. This will present a new challenge for public and investor relations teams, marketers, corporate legal counsel and the C-suite. CEO’s if they are the spokesperson, will face some interesting challenges. These are issues well beyond simple reputation management of a brand.

What Kind of Threats?
This is where influence and authority trump reputation management. The types of threats coming from Influence Competitors are those that can cause significant economic damage or bring down a government (such as Egypt, but that’s okay, it was a dictatorship) or potentially cause catastrophic damage to a company. These threats include;

- Derailing legislative efforts

- Destroying lobbying efforts

- Changes in legislation that derails a corporate plan

- Causing damage to physical assets

- Threatening employees or causing harm

- Cause a stock price to plummet or a competitors to rise

- Balance the influence in favor of a competitor

- Create petitions and enable an opposition government to cause collapse of a government in power

Fortunately we provide analysis and monitoring of Influence Competitors. Look for our White Paper coming soon. In a world of Big Data, companies and governments need to be able to quickly sift through vast amounts of information to find the intelligence that matters.

Klout or PeerIndex & Their Value or Non-Value

We’ve been knocking about the value and veracity of Klout and others like PeerIndex in our offices for some time now and we posted before on the issue of Klout. So we looked at Klout and PeerIndex a little deeper recently, to try and sort out just where these tools sit in the greater scheme of marketing. We then went out to look and compare Klout with PeerIndex to understand their place in the social media ecosystem.

Where Klout is Good Etc.
Klout: Is all about marketing. For the individual, it is an “ego tool” kind of like the social media version of “ego surfing”. Perhaps if you were a geek or nerd in high school you may find some greater comfort in having a higher Klout score that the “in” crowd you were left out of.

Aside from the ego aspect, Klout wants you to publish more content and build more of a network because that is vital to their business model. Their business value is eyeballs and people that appear – the word appear is key here – to have some “influence” in one or more online communities. Your value to Klout is how many people you might potentially have some level of influence with. They sell peoples apparent (not real) influence to brands and products. You as a consumer may get some free products in return for mentioning these products or services. We find no problem with this and quite frankly, it is a great marketers tool. It relies on human’s competitive nature and as a result, will likely do fairly well. Klout will also likely anger consumers as much as Facebook. It is the love-hate relationship many consumers have with social media tools.

Where Klout Fails
But Klout will not help with understand the true “authority” of someone. Influence is, well, interesting, but in real terms, it’s not influence that matters, its authority. This is where Klout fails. It also fails in matters of small, but powerful communities. Klout looks at the Really Big Picture – for brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, MacDonald’s or Wal-Mart. But it fails at a very local level and it fails when it comes to non-marketing issues like civil society.

Where PeerIndex Wins
PeerIndex has taken the approach to “authority” by looking at the topics people discuss the most in primary social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Don’t be mistaken, they are targeting to sell this “authority” to brands in the same way as Klout. And why not? They are a business and the purpose of a business is to make a profit. PeerIndex is a second to Klout who has gained more media and social media attention and holds first-mover status. So PeerIndex has a catch-up job. We found that compared to Klout though, PeerIndex was “trusted” far more than Klout at a 3:1 ratio. The key will be if PeerIndex can attract the eyeballs and conversion. Klout has lots of well, inexplicable dashboard things like “reach” that really don’t tell you anything. We see PeerIndex as being a bit more focused on methodology and greater transparency on their science.

Where PeerIndex Fails
Where Klout is focused on “influence” it seems PeerIndex has chosen “authority”. We find the PeerIndex approach easier to understand than Klout, but they exclude the level of influence. PeerIndex, like Klout, also excludes the cultural and smaller social networks where greater value can be found. PeerIndex is focused on more channels than Klout, which helps (including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, plus Quora and some blogs) but they too miss the secondary, but often more active networks that could yield a greater sense of authority. They may include an individuals blog that signs up for PeerIndex, but they don’t capture (and it would be a challenge to do this) the broader blogosphere or Blog Rings.

Where Klout & PeerIndex Utterly Fall Down
Both Klout and PeerIndex pretty much ignore non-major social media services in North America such as Orkut, BigAdda, MySpace, hi5, AllAfricans.com and many other vital cultural and hobby-based networks. Essentially, both Klout and PeerIndex really only care about the big brands and the U.S., UK or Canadian markets. They completely miss the influence and authority of the Web as a whole and its interconnected communities which is very multicultural and global in scale.

In Summary
Klout and PeerIndex both offer some value for marketers. In major Western markets and well, that’s where the big bucks are and they’re businesses. But when it comes to where the next growth area is in social media, which is civil society, they both fail terribly. But then so do all social media monitoring and reputation management tools. PeerIndex hopes to own the “authority” segment while Klout wants to own “influence” and there is a difference between the two. Someone should own, or attempt to, both influence and authority. That will be a challenge, but isn’t impossible. So choose your poison as a marketer.

The Hidden Internet in Developing Nations

Internet access is ubiquitous in the developed nations of the West. Penetration is close to 100% and we access the Web not just from a PC but from our smart phones and tablets like the iPad or Playbook. We’ve learned over our years of research that when it comes to developing nations, we in the West or the Global North if you will, tend to think that access in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, India and across most of Africa is minimal and only for the Elites who can afford it. This is a dangerous assumption that may cost governments their power or at least a little troubles. Companies doing business in the Global South may also suffer from boycotts of products to organized protests, especially when it comes to the extractive resource sector.

Governments, larger NGO’s and NPO’s and corporations of the Global North often make their assumptions on Internet usage from generally available data on Internet usage stats. For example the World Bank database on Internet stats and the oft referred Internet World Stats published by for-profit marketing company Miniwatts. While their data is good it tends only to look at numbers published by ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) and Telco’s in those countries. Our research indicates that the gap between official and unofficial online populations in developing nations is as much as 60% in many cases. This is a significant disparity. Here is some data visualized in Google from World Bank data, perhaps the closest to reality, but still not entirely accurate.

The Hidden Internet

What we’ve come to find through our ongoing research projects, is that the number published by most organizations is often just the surface of real access and rarely accounts for mobile device connectivity to the Internet. We call it the Hidden Internet. It’s vibrant, it’s alive and it’s growing. It’s hidden, essentially, because there is no formal mechanism for recognizing or evaluating its presence or that of the people contributing. Here’s how it works;

Pirate Connections: Illegal access through wireless networks directly by hackers. This most often happens for criminal organizations that send out those mass emails about their cousin who died with millions in the bank and only you can help them get the money, with a generous reward for your time of course!

Unofficial ISP’s: We’ve found a number of times that a person may subscribe to service from the local, official Telco or ISP for a broadband connection to their home. They then install a wired or wireless router and resell connection to their neighbours to help cover the cost of access and sometimes turn a small profit. They are unofficial and may even rent out access to their PC in their own homes.

Education System: Then there’s the universities and high-schools with multiple students online. Often times parents and friends can gain access to these services as part of literacy training for the community. We’ve seen this in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Amman and many other cities. These numbers are not officially counted though. We estimate that for every student, two additional community members are regularly accessing the Web.

Internet Cafe’s: One of our favourite examples here is Haiti. The assumption by many aid agencies and some governments has been that Internet access by non-elites is minimal. The reality however, is far different. Shortly after the earthquake in 2010, Internet cafe’s popped up in tents in the tent communities; they remain active to this day. These Internet cafe’s are increasingly popular throughout the developing world and play a crucial role in connecting communities, improving literacy both in ICT and language.

Mobile Devices: With most developing nations building sophisticated wireless networks from 3G to 4G and up, mobile device use of data services is surging. In fact Africa is one of the fastest growing mobile regions in the world. The Congo went from 2% population penetration in 2000 to approaching 50% in 2010. Some research on low income urban youth using mobile devices shows it’s not just texting, but social media use that is growing on mobile devices. Some other research in southern Africa countries shows over 54% of the time mobile devices are used to access social media channels. We forecast that mobile device access for social media services will be the biggest growth sector in mobile data usage, not texting. The role of texting in online communications behaviour is limited at best. Accessing image sharing and the conversation streams possible in status updates and rich content sharing to Facebook, Zoopy or PlentyAfricans.com for example brings a deeper, richer layer of engagement that is a natural element of human communications through digital media.

Summary & Moving Forward
Organizations such as the World Bank and Internet World stats or Africa Analysis have been well done, but the methodologies and the questions have been the issue. We would argue that additional research can be carried out through technologies such as our mediasphere360 and digging a little deeper in on-the-ground research. Even with the capabilities of our technology it is hard to truly quantify the real numbers. But the volume of conversations we measure and analyse for clients and the anecdotal data we collect on the ground is indicative of a larger, more engaged online population in the Global South than we have a tendency to acknowledge. Empirical methods alone are proving inadequate to gain the deeper insights necessary to understand how digital citizens in developing nations are engaging. Different, complimentary approaches will be needed in the future. Traditional methodologies are still and will remain, necessary. But layered online analysis is now vital. The role of digital diaspora is also key to understanding connectivity and engagement.

Orienteering Rules for Twitter

For those not engaged in Twitter, as in actively using it daily and participating (not just looking), it is often very difficult to understand. The comment most often heard of the nascent or determined non-Twitter user is; “I don’t get it.” So they don’t use it. Then it certainly is the case that you won’t get it. This causes bigger issues for government departments and corporations concerned with Twitter for crisis signals in social media or reputation management.

Social media monitoring tools can help somewhat, but tend to focus on Twitter as a channel and limit their “analysis” of Twitter users “influence” to rules set within the Twitter channel (i.e. how many followers they have, how much they re-tweet, how much their content gets re-tweeted). This can create a false trail and miss the actual story or issue. It is one of the many failings of social media monitoring tools today. To date, I’ve yet to see a single monitoring tool able to deliver network analysis and put an issue into context. The best we’ve seen for measuring Twitter influence is Klout, it’s good, not great, but the best out there.

Twitter is a live real-time map of the Web. Constantly. It is a set of road signs showing major highways, side paths, rivers, streams and oceans of data. I personally call it the Amazon river of the Internet, of Cyburbia. It is a constant flowing stream. Often inane, sometimes however, filled with nuggets of gold in the world of information arbitration.

In Twitter, a story can start anywhere, by anyone. A story can be false from the start, yet become quickly viral and evolve into a hashtag (i.e. #Jan25 for Egypt) or fizzle quickly. The challenge is to understand a) what is real and what is fake b) the true influence and authority of not just the originator but perhaps the first 30-50 people to then Re-Tweet the story and c) where is the story going matched to d) a validation incident that both quantifies and qualifies the original story. From this as well, is the need to “map the issue” through the network. This can only be done manually today…although we have been working with some clever folks on this, as are others.

But Twitter cannot really be “explained” to someone. I can tell you it is a service that only gives you 140 characters to say something and/or share a link to something else on the Web. But that doesn’t explain “how” Twitter has been adapted by netizens for sales, marketing, public relations, disinformation, crowdsourcing, organizing, protesting and so on…but it has and is, being used in all these ways.

But analysts and researchers who simply observe and do not engage, will always have a challenge to not only understand what is happening in Twitter, but how to use it.

Rules of Orienteering Twitter

The first rule to orienteering in Twitter is to engage. Only then will you be able to get a compass bearing.

The second rule is to participate in sharing content and engaging in discussion

The third rule is to be patient and expend the time. Building a stream that has inherent value takes time.

I suspect there are more and of course, we welcome your views and ideas.

Weak Signals & Social Media Monitoring

Weak Signals? These are essentially the little “tidbits” of information, words such as “tags” or keywords, that give an “indication” of something. Perhaps a potential “meme” shaping up, or a subject about to become hot. In some cases they point to a conversation. Most monitoring tools don’t and can’t pick them up. They aren’t always keywords one thinks of to enter. The greatest value to weak signals though is not as a single word or phrase/comment, but a set of commonalities within those weak signals.

String them together or plot them using a capable software, and you can begin to see bigger pictures, detect a trend or find somewhere else to start digging. All of which requires a skilled analyst and the use of the right kind of software. In the intelligence field, weak signals are always a key element to investigating an online issue for police, intelligence and similar professionals.

But they can also be a rich source information for marketing purposes. If you’re engaging a social media research firm or online monitoring tool, it can help to ask if they understand what weak signals are and the value they can bring. None of the automated tools in the commercial sector can deal with weak signals…no software is that good. Yet. Eventually, certainly. As most social media monitoring tools rely on API‘s (backdoor connections to access search results) into consumer search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Bing) only, they rely heavily on the algorithms used by those engines. Those who understand and can work with weak signals will have their own methodology on how to use them, as we do at MediaBadger. We don’t make that public because that’s part of our value and well, we are a business.

The benefits of being able to understand, then find and work with weak signals are many on the marketing side. They can indicate a trend around a product, be it yours or a competitors, that can enable you to engage an audience before a crisis or while an opportunity is on the upswing. For public relations, you can become aware of a potentially breaking or critical story and get ahead of the curve. You might find an interesting new route into a discussion underway that provides key insights into your industry or market.

Weak signals are useful, but it’s about understanding what they are, how they can be useful and how to go about understanding them. Once you do, you might be amazed how they can be used.

(Author: G. Crouch)