Alex Steer

678 words | ~3 min

The title of this post pretty much sums it up. A lot of brands and organisations treat social media as if, as its name implied, it were primarily a media channel. This is a mistake.

By this, I don't mean to rehash the lesson that surely everyone in marketing must have heard by now - that brands should not just use social media to broadcast messages. This is obviously true: for a sample, look at the Twitter feeds or Facebook fan pages of a lot of brands, which seem to function largely as repositories for press releases, with little or no two-way conversation happening. This is not the point I'm making.

Rather, the important mistake a lot of brands are making in social media is to assume that what they say about themselves has any weight of authority behind it at all.

Think of it this way. If you book a load of TV spots in which to run an ad, those spots are the primary TV space in which your brand is discussed. There may be a few tactical ads from your competitors which mention you disparagingly, and you may be mentioned on a few TV programmes. Unless you're BP, and everyone's talking about you, it's genuinely true that in media your own brand messages will be more prominent than other people's mentions of your brand. In media, in other words, the buyer calls the shots.

Social media channels are virtually costless to use. What's more, there is very little extra benefit to be gained from paying. Yes, there are banner ads and keyword ads and expensive search engine optimisation and bungs to bloggers and even more expensive digital campaigns, but the hard truth is that you can't out-shout the rest of the internet. And if all the other users of a media channel decide to start talking about you, and can afford to do it, then your life takes a rather unexpected turn. This happens occasionally in paid media: it's happening to BP at the moment. Typically, in 'antisocial media' like print and TV, the duration of the effect for a given brand is fairly short. Once journalists and commentators and activists and other brands have stopped talking about BP, they'll move on to something else.

In social media, by contrast, where the amount of media is not constrained by the size of the channel (virtually limitless) or the cost of communication (virtually nothing), the noise for any individual brand can be sustained. However loud you can shout, you can always be shouted down. It's a little like being BP, all day, every day.

Of course, there are ways of dealing with this kind of mayhem. They're not advertising solutions, though, but solutions from 'crisis PR'. The name is a giveaway. When everyone else is talking about your brand in mainstream media, it's typically a crisis: a high-intensity, short-duration and potentially damaging experience. In social media the intensity is still high but there's no guarantee the duration will be short. It may also not be as negative. Many of the actors in social media may be saying positive or neutral things about you.

So don't just think about doing 'social media activity', like you would print or press activity. Yes, be proactive, execute, do good work using those channels. But underpin that with a constant vigilance as if every day required a low-level version of the sort of thing that happens during crisis PR campaigns. The surest way to do this, and to ensure that events don't actually go critical without you noticing, is to invest in good monitoring of social media channels (hence the relevance to this blog, hence why I'm writing this post). If this sounds like an expensive sell, it needn't be. If you like, consider it as part of your advertising planning cost, since sensitive analysis can lead not just to a tactical understanding of who's saying what, but to decent insights that can inform your creative work in social media.

In short: listen first, then you'll know how loud to shout.

964 words | ~5 min

I was discussing earlier today some of the problems with measuring the clarity of brand propositions through quantitative research. Tracking whether or not people out there in the world 'get' your brand and its messages is very desirable, and therefore widely done.

The problem is, how do you know what to ask? One answer is to get the brand manager or agency planner to set the questions. Suppose you are responsible for Fizzy X, a low-sugar fizzy drink brand that is targeted at the premium end of the (low-sugar) fizzy drinks market, and whose advertising positions it as the perfect choice of fizzy drink for young high-income twenty-something urban professionals who strive to get the most out of life. (Before you say it, no, you'd not be the only brand to have seized upon this idea, and yes, there are lots of problems with it as a positioning.) How do you test whether all this is getting through to people? Some of the statements you might ask respondents to agree/disagree with are fairly unproblematic: 'Fizzy X represents value for money'; 'Fizzy X tastes good'; 'Fizzy X is low in sugar'; 'Fizzy X is good for you'; etc. These questions can also quite easily be asked of other brands within the category (e.g. Bubbly Y and Zippy Z) for comparison.

How do you test all that stuff about high-flying twenty-somethings, though? Planners and marketers tend to call these 'extrinsics' - elements of the brand that are not strongly connected to the realities of the product or service. Marketing surveys often come straight out and asking for agreement/disagreement with statements designed to test awareness of these extrinsics. So you might see a survey for Fizzy X which includes the statement 'Fizzy X is for young people', or 'Fizzy X is for people who are going places', or even 'Fizzy X gives me confidence'. Sometimes these questions will be asked only of Fizzy X. Sometimes they will form part of a list of extrinsic questions derived from a marketer/researcher's perceptions of all the brands in the category, with each question asked for each brand. So, if Fizzy X's positioning is very up-and-coming and Bubbly Y's positioning is very sports-heavy, the survey might include the statements 'This brand is associated with sport' and 'This brand is for people who are going places', with no prizes for guessing which brand is likely to score highest on each measure.

Here's the problem. Even the least thoughtful consumers are likely to think about price, packaging, and maybe other intrinsics like health benefits when choosing between brands. They are likely to have reasonably clear views on intrinsic statements like 'This brand offers good value for money'. Honestly, though, when faced with a statement like 'This brand is for people who are going places', most of us will not have thought about it for most brands. (The brand managers of the world will be lucky if most of us carry these thoughts around for more than a few categories - cars, for instance, and certain categories of fashion. The extent to which extrinsic thoughts are attached to different categories is itself an interesting question - why can we associate a brand of car or watch or spirits to James Bond, but not a brand of baked beans or window cleaner?) The problem is made worse by the fact that the statements are devised by market researchers and brand managers, people who spend all day thinking about their brands and their personalities.

Ask people to respond to extrinsic brand statements (for which they have no ready answer) in the same way as they respond to intrinsic ones (for which they do) and they will assume they should have a ready answer. They will answer under a sort of mental 'exam conditions' in which an 'erm, I suppose' becomes a 'yes, absolutely', and an 'erm, I never thought about that' becomes a 'no, absolutely not'. This is a recipe for either happy brand managers or unhappy ones when they get the research back, whereas what the brand managers deserve to be is unclear, none the wiser, feeling much like respondents generally feel about their brands. These researched statements may give options for levels of agreement ('agree strongly', 'agree', 'unsure', etc.), but I've yet to see one with an extra box marked 'Who bloody cares? It's only a fizzy drink.' This seems an unfortunate omission.

So here's a thought. Rather than relying on brand managers and planners, briefs and brand manifestos to come up with brand clarity statements and questions, why not base them in part on what people are already saying about your brand out there in the real world? As what is said in social media becomes increasingly reflective of the breadth of good and bad things people have to say about brands (and about everything else), social media intelligence becomes an increasingly useful and sophisticated tool for measuring brand clarity, just as it is for measuring awareness and sentiment. Good monitoring might reveal, for example, that a lot of people in your target market talk about Fizzy X as the drink of choice for vulgar acquisitive rich kids that nobody really likes. Since this is rarely the kind of thing that brand managers and planners want to admit to themselves, the statement 'I hate people who drink this brand' may not have made it onto the survey, but maybe it should.

The idea of 'brand clarity' supposes that brands are best understood by their originators. Better monitoring may reveal not only areas of unclarity, but fundamental divides between in-house perceptions and those of the public, and may even imply that the guardians of the brand are the ones whose perceptions are in the minority.

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Just finished reading McKinsey's briefing 'A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing'. In brief, it recommends assessing (not really measuring) WOM impact by factoring in the volume of messages and various aspects which come together to form the impact of messages.

The aspects of impact are 'Network: Where are they talking?', 'Message content: What are they saying?', 'Message source: What is the trigger?', and 'Sender: Who is talking?' The second of these ('Message content') involves a judgement of whether or not what is said represents a 'Relevant key buying factor' for consumers.

Though this will appeal to marketers who are ultimately very sales-driven, this heuristic seems to undervalue damage to brands. A message that says 'Brand X is poisonous' obviously contains a 'relevant key buying factor', but does a message that says 'Brand X uses suppliers who use palm oil that is diminishing rainforests and leading to greater food insecurity in South America'? The latter may lead some very rainforest-minded consumers to avoid purchasing Brand X's products, but the total damage done may not translate quickly into sales. It may take years of incremental bad news for consumers to turn against Brand X and favour Brand Y. Alternatively it may lead to avoidance or restriction on purchasing in the whole category, if consumers come to perceive that the whole set of brands in the category are similarly undesirable. Or it may not affect sales much at all, but may damage the credibility of Brand X in a way that pushes up its required marketing budget by diminishing return on investment.

Identifying 'key buying factors' means knowing a lot about how consumers are feeling and thinking, and the impact of those thoughts and feelings on their purchasing decisions. The heuristic is only really useful, then, if you have a lot of data and insight to back it up. Otherwise there's a good chance your analysis will be wrong, and will turn a measurement tool into a rather formalised wild guess.

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Catching up on a bit of reading, I've noticed a lot of futurists considering the perceptual impact of the grounding of flights due to the Icelandic volcano eruption. My Futures Company colleague Andrew Curry summarises the kinds of reperception that are taking place, and Gideon Rachman (in the FT) smartly observes that the frustration normally felt by the poor or disenfranchised has briefly been extended to everyone by the impossibility of getting off the ground.

But there's an odd strain of nostalgia running through much of the output from this volcanic sub-genre. Even as writers imagine possible futures, some of these futures seem to resemble versions of the inaccessible past. They are, to pinch from William Empson, versions of pastoral.

We catch glimpses of these pastoral worlds of slow movement in for example, Doreen Massey's essay, 'Is the world getting larger or smaller?', republished by Open Democracy (and linked to by Andrew). She argues, fairly persuasively, about the effect that the creation of rapid travel 'hubs' has had on communities that fall in the spaces between and so remain away from the main currents of globalised life - though this is by no means a new phenomenon, even if the hubs are now nodes in a vastly larger network. I'm not sure if I agree that in a fast world 'there is no question of the pleasures of movement or travel': rather, I suspect the feasibility of rapid movement has enabled the emergence of less pleasure-orientated categories of travel - like business travel, for instance - that were previously confined either to small distances or to small constituencies of people, such as merchants. Was mercantile travel ever a pleasure?

To deny that travel is a pleasure to be savoured now implies that once it was, and that there is, in the words of Christopher Reid's 'Second Genesis':

a pang too, at the back / Of the mind: a loss... a lack...

Nowhere is that more strongly felt than in Alain de Botton's essay 'A world without planes', published on the BBC Radio 4 website (of course). The essay imagines not so much a future world without aircraft as a long-past world, a tribal culture at which 'children would gather at the feet of old men' - a world for which aeroplanes and all of modernity were part of their inaccessible past. De Botton's planeless world feels as though it exists in the aftermath of some terrible war, devoid of a generation of rushing young men. In a world without planes, he writes, 'we would admire them like small boys do, and adults no longer dare'. The world without planes is at once an old world (located in the future) and a childish one (located in the past), living a second childhood. If De Botton means at all to imply that the world he has created is senile, he does so subtly; if not, he ignores the sad, gentle mockery that the term 'second childhood' has always carried with it, and its fatalism. His prose unwinds with a languor that fits the slow world he invokes.

To my partial reader's eye, this slowness can never be a welcome return to 'a wisdom that [our] medieval pilgrim ancestors had once known very well'. This is the meander, not of a world that is slow, but of a world that has been slowed. (In aviation terms, we already live in a slowed world, with the demise of Concorde. Of all people, Jeremy Clarkson writes surprisingly powerfully on this.) I tend to disagree forcefully with futurists who advocate return to the predecessor states of ecologically unsustainable systems. Carbon-intensive electricity generation is unsustainable, but it is worth fighting to develop better systems before we get the candles out of the cupboard. I cannot support the ultra-local food movement because if applied everywhere its impact on marginal populations (not to mention marginal costs) would lead to mass starvation. A world without planes is a world in which aid takes months to reach disaster zones, in which displaced relatives cannot return to family emergencies, in which we content ourselves with less. And that's not good enough.

290 words | ~1 min

I've spent the last few days, in spare moments, looking at morphosyntax: how information about things like number, tense, person, and case are encoded in words, and how they should be processed and understood.

Which is obviously almost as rock and roll as throwing a TV out of a window. Even within the domain of linguistics it's pretty geeky stuff, I know. But it has the virtue of being interesting (to me) and pretty hard, meaning that understanding it usually takes a while and a bit of head-scratching.

And that's good. It's good for people who work in strategy, of any stripe, to have interests that make them think in pure, theoretical, or just plain logical ways. Strategists usually describe what they do as critical or rigorous or even logical, and they tend to use words like 'problem-solving' and 'analysis' pretty freely. But in a lot of what we do the real difficulty seems to lie in communication, or application, or the political difficulties of getting agreement on ideas and approaches. Much of the head-scratching comes from things other than really rigorous logical problem-solving: getting our facts straight and our numbers right. Which is not to devalue everything else - a strategist who can't get a strategy put into action is pointless - but just to say that the pure problem-solving part of the job can get neglected.

It's not just brain-training, either. Whether it's crosswords, number puzzles, computer games, rock-climbing or one-man tiddlywinks (not a euphemism), it's good to compete only with your own brain from time to time. If I don't understand some theory on language, that's no one's fault but mine; the satisfaction when something clicks is uncomplicated; and the challenge to understand it better is irresistible.

388 words | ~2 min

Is PowerPoint making us stupid? No.

A piece in the New York Times (now a few days old) describes the agony of US soldiers who spend too much of their time (a) making or (b) sitting through turgid PowerPoint presentations. The piece is good and the strategy diagram at the top is funnier for not being a joke. But there's a nagging suggestion, despite the disclaimer that 'no one is suggesting that Powerpoint is to blame', that PowerPoint is to blame - not just for military failings but for much that is wrong within the domain of strategic planning. This is pretty typical:

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers - referred to as PowerPoint Rangers -in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader's pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

The ubiquity of PowerPoint from boardroom to war room is not new, nor are the mutters of concerns about this. Edward Tufte's essay 'The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint' examines some flaws in how PowerPoint organises information by default (essentially paratactically - 'one damn slide after another' - with rigid nested hierarchies by means of bullet points).

It's quite a leap to assert that PowerPoint is killing the art of strategic thinking, though - by which I mean thinking that is itself well fitted to the problems it is trying to solve. I'd venture that rigid organisational hierarchies, not hierarchies of bullet points, are more at fault, as is simple time pressure. Strategies take time and space, and the crystal clear thinking that results can come out of some surprisingly unordered processes (ones strategists tend not to admit to, which is a shame). Bad PowerPoint is a symptom of stifled strategic thinking, not a cause. Sure, the software doesn't go out of its way to offer ingenious ways of concatenating points of information, but that's well beyond its remit. If the paper-clippy Office Assistant starts thinking up my strategy for me I'll know it's time to lay off the coffee.

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It's common, when teaching ethics and policy issues, to take examples from the sciences, especially biology. You probably know the type of question used to spark these debates. Should human cloning be legal? How about GM food production? How much regulation is appropriate for a DNA database?

These questions are relevant and interesting, and provide a good applied basis for developing one's theoretical ethical and political analysis skills. Oddly, though, I've never seen linguistics used as the jumping-off point for such exercises, despite the obvious applicability of case studies like the following:

A university has 25,000 students and provides each of them with an email address, and the university's mailservers store copies of all mail sent and received by students. Should it be legal to make the text of those email messages accessible to:

1. The university's own researchers?
2. Researchers from other universities?
3. Market research companies?

In each case, should the data be anonymised?

Or:

Should sentiment analysis software be used to target advertising to individual users of Twitter or Facebook?

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There's been a bit of a hiatus on posting here, as I've been busy. I'll shortly be adding several posts that I've written, but not uploaded, over the last few weeks. Sorry for the bombardment.

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Just reading a case study by the NLP (Natural Language Processing) team at PARC on improving search string parsing in Powerset. It's good, but it includes the following very common question:

CEO Barney Pell observes... 'Why do we have to translate our intelligence into a grunting pidgin language in order to interact with computers?' To address this gap, Powerset's founders decided to create a consumer search engine based on natural language processing technologies, which enable people to interact more naturally with computers through normal language expressions instead of forced computer jargon.

This classic defence of NLP for search (which scarcely needs defending, as its benefits are so obvious) is based on the assumption that people want to type natural language expressions into search engines in full. This is based on the correct insight that severe restrictions on string formation (think Boolean operators or Google's inurl: or filetype: operators) can be offputting, but it's an overextension of this insight which ends up assuming that people's time has no value. Compared to computer scientists, who will do almost anything to save on an unnecessary keystroke, general searchers are pretty forgiving. Still, it would be unwise, surely, to pour too many NLP resources into high-end sentence processing of the kind needed to work out the information demand in a string like 'Which is the most expensive restaurant in New York where a fish course is not served?', if most search strings are not formed like that. Better to spend time, money and effort understanding how searchers economise - in other words, to treat search strings as a corpus and analyse the features which over-index in that corpus compared to a corpus of general written English. Click-through rates could be used as a register of semantic intent.

Of course, higher-level sentence processing is useful for answering the queries of users who do search using full sentences, but search strings probably count as a sociolect in themselves whose grammar is worth understanding.

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It must, in fairness, be a nightmare writing party election manifestos, knowing that every word will be pored over by journalists, lobbyists, organisations and individuals looking to wring every drop of significance from whatever you commit to paper. Little wonder they're frequently so dry - any misplaced phrase can drop with a resounding clang.

In the run-up to the UK general election, though, the Labour Party has surpassed itself with the innocuous but amusing title of its manifesto. The Conservatives' manifesto (PDF), launched today, dodges most ambiguities and seems decisive by using imperative phrases for most of its section headings - e.g. 'Make politics more accountable', 'Combat climate change' (though it falls at the last hurdle with a section on 'One World Conservatism' which, for me, activates a sense of similarity not with the happy notion of a 'One World' movement but the sinister prospect of 'One World Government').

Labour's manifesto, though, sticks its ambiguity on the front page.

Fans of psycholinguistics will be familiar with the garden path model of sentence processing, which holds that readers parse lexical units (words or compounds) in sentences sequentially, checking for semantic consistency as we go and revising our initial assumptions whenever we find something that confounds them - so we can read and make sense of the phrase Jack gave in and parse 'gave in' as an intransitive phrasal verb in the sense 'surrendered', then revise our reading when our eyes take in the next few words and we read that Jack gave in his homework, and realise that 'gave in' is a transitive verb in the sense 'submitted'. We might then see the word book at the end of the sentence, and then we'd have to re-parse 'homework' as an attributive noun (or an adjective, depending on your point of view) in the compound 'homework book'.

So what's the issue with A future fair for all? One adjunct to the garden path model is the idea of minimal attachment, which proposes that as readers or listeners we assume simple/familiar relationships between words until the evidence forces us to reconsider. So, for example, we find sentences like the horse raced past the barn fell hard to make sense of, and I put the candy on the table in my mouth faintly confusing, because we assume we are reading a sentence about a horse racing past a barn (rather than being raced past a barn and falling) or candy being put on a table (rather than candy already on a table being put in one's mouth).

Minimal attachment errors can also lead us to some odd mental images - such as a table in one's mouth. The community at Language Log christened these baffling sentences 'crash blossoms', and the Crash Blossoms Blog records plenty of examples, mainly from the linguistic pressure-cookers that are newspaper headlines.

A future fair for all seems to be causing its readers some trouble and amusement. While nobody seriously assumes that Gordon Brown is planning a massive funfair at a to-be-specified later date, it's clear that the phrase is being activated in this way for plenty of people, perhaps before its intended meaning - 'a future that is fair for everybody'.

Minimal attachment is to blame. Here's an example of the way a garden-path reader might parse the line.

A future (determiner/article + noun)

A future fair (determiner/article + adjective + noun: future reanalysed)

A future fair for all (determiner/article + adjective + noun + prepositional phrase)

(Note: it's possible to parse a future fair as determiner + noun + adjective, with 'fair' as a postpositive adjective - as in the old hymn which promises believers 'a harp, a home, a mansion fair'. Postpositive adjectives are now fairly uncommon and archaic, though, so this meaning is less likely to be activated.)

It takes another look and a bit of contextual thinking to realise that Labour are not promising a funfair in the future, and that the minimally attached reading is not plausible, even though it is semantically well-formed.

We've been stitched up by a feature of English syntax: the reduced relative clause. This feature allows relative clauses to skip the introductory relative pronoun - so instead of the shoes which are on my feet we can say the shoes on my feet.

This means that we can, without seeming to violate any constraints of English syntax, talk about a future fair for all. It's just that garden-path processing and minimal attachment will mean that what we intend may not be the first meaning that occurs to our readers.

Which, when it comes to canvassing for votes, is not a good thing.