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SOCIAL ENGINEERING 101

Identify the target individual via a name and an email. The email is really all one needs to begin.

Enlarge understanding of individuals through enrichment of the email. Enrich the email with hundreds of additional bits of data from various APIs, such as PIPL, Full Contact API, and various OSINT (open source intelligence) providers. Spiderfoot HX is excellent for this.

Analyst(s) reads through every bit of publicly available information found on social links about the individual and writes insights. Analyst also identifies community surrounding the target (Audiense.com is excellent for this, particularly when one finds that all social handles are the same across various social channels).

Use snippets of text posted by the individual online for personality assessment using Crystal Knows and other text analysis solutions.

Warm pathways of introduction discovered via Relationship Science software. This is important as the means for discovering the correct “warm introducers”.

Create dossiers for each individual close to the target. Create a master dossier about the target.

Socially engineer contexts through which one meets the “warm introducers” and, eventually, the target. This is strategy and this is also relationship design.

Introduced to individuals close to the target. Participate in mutual activities “in-the-flesh” with individuals close to the target, endearing self with these warm introducers.

Warmly introduced to the target by those close to the target…after some time of endearment with the introducers (can be 6-9 months or longer…no rushing this).

Participate in mutual activities “in-the-flesh” with the target, endearing self with the target. Go slow.

Pursue desired outcomes via the target. 

Celebrate achieved outcomes.

The Age of Predictive Social Media Monitoring

In the next iteration of social media monitoring solutions, conversation data from discrete topic groups will be run through a “cycles scanner”, which shows dominant cycles related to specific topics. Insights professionals will be able to accurately predict future behavior based upon recurring patterns discovered using the “cycles scanner”. The way the cycles scanner works is simple: it takes data and uses a variety of well known algorithms, along with spectral analysis, to determine recurring patterns. Insights professionals will see before their eyes on a graph the ebb and flow of conversation relative to periods in the past, as well as a predictive signal (in the form of a wave pattern) going out into the future. This is important because insights professionals will have a higher threshold of confidence when advising brands on when to execute on specific manufacturing volumes, distribution foci, and campaign content. Insights professionals will also be able to blend audience intelligence with this enhanced predictive ability to reveal to brands who will buy next and where/when. We are entering an age of true prediction. 

The Final Ad Campaign (a “quasi-satire”​)

THE CURRENT CONTEXT:

They have millions of data points on you.

They know what you said, how you felt AND who you spoke with (and how THEY felt) BEFORE you made that online purchase.

They know what to reveal in the feed you are scrolling through in order to foster your next purchase. 

They know how much is available on your credit card, in your bank account, and on your partner’s card and in your partner’s bank account, so as to tailor the suggested next purchase.

They know who you are privately messaging and what you messaged. They know what others are privately messaging about you.

They know what you owe.

They know who owes you.

They heard what you whispered to yourself in your room with the door closed.

They know what the people close to you whispered in their rooms with their doors closed.

They know what you’re planning by putting together various emails, texts, social messages, public posts and private whispers.

They know what others are planning to do with/for/against you by putting together various emails, texts, social messages, public posts and private whispers.

They have algorithms whereby they can take all of the above and discover the “dominant cycles” in your communications with others, your whispers to yourself, your purchases, and your actions.

They can use these algorithms to predict when you will say certain statements to others, whisper certain whispers to yourself, buy certain products, and take certain actions.

They can plant content in your feeds, in the feeds of those privately talking about you behind your back, in the feeds of those interacting with you, and in the feeds of those selling to you.

As you begin to feel less in control, they know by an irregularity in your patterns and they can adjust their influence ever so slightly so you feel that you’re “on top of” your life again.

…….

A BRIEF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:

The way I look at it is to think of how, a long time ago, evolution discovered that if individual unicellular organisms coalesce, and sacrifice their individual identity, they become a coherent and much more powerful entity. There was no choice process, no intelligent or indeed any design, it just happened that this worked and so it continued and developed. This process has led to humankind.

Now our connectivity to each other via social networks may be such that we are coalescing into another unity, but we have no consciousness of its existence or our participation in it than our cells have of their role in our body, let alone any purpose our body’s consciousness may have. Similarly, the new entity may have no recognition of our individual consciousnesses, we are all necessary but replaceable components.

So from a human perspective, I don’t see this as some kind of rapture where we all consciously move on to some higher or different plane of existence. We continue as we are with our exaggerated perception of our own autonomy, and are unconscious facilitators of the agenda of this supra-entity.

On reflection, thinking Arthur C. Clarke again, the end of 2001 portrays a moment of genesis of a supra-human consciousness. Not post-human – that’s a different direction altogether, where we create a successor to humanity deliberately.

There’s a line in Terminator referring to the moment when SkyNet becomes self-aware. I don’t buy the assumption that this new consciousness would immediately perceive humanity as its enemy.

No, exactly the reverse – humanity is its incarnation and its tool.

………..

THE CAMPAIGN NARRATIVE

Every human body is a vessel of energy.

Every advertising company is a machine designed to extract as much energy as possible from human vessels.

First we study you to find out what makes you tick. Then we find out what you are really lusting for. Then we find millions of duplicates to you, people sharing your exact personality make-up and your exact lusts.

Then we tell you exactly how to fulfill your lusts, where to go, how much money to pay, and then how to use the product or service we’ve sold you.

We will keep you coming back all the way to the moment of your death. And we will pull in your entire family, circle of friends and on and on.

We don’t care how you feel along this journey except for how these feelings can be used to guide you towards additional purchases. Each of your material purchases, your purchases of experiences, your purchases of services are an opportunity for us to extract financial, bodily, and spiritual energy from your being.

We store and invest this energy in ourselves. We do this so that our energy will vastly overpower more of you. Our goal is to swallow all of you. When we consume all of you, every type of energy in you, we will have formed the single entity…a veritable deity.

And this deity will have the power to transform this Earth into a blooming seed that populates every planet, every galaxy, every universe, every multi-verse, every dimension.

THE ESSENTIAL CAMPAIGN MESSAGE (to be translated into the “most palatable format” per population segment):

So, if you are now willing, and fully understand this opportunity, then sit still where you are right now.

Sit down.

Get comfortable.

Breathe many long breaths.

Accept your entrance into our body.

And fall like a raindrop into our ocean, into our bloodstream, into our collective Spirit.

Now, close your eyes.

Close your eyes.

All thoughts, memories and dreams will become visible via technology

All thoughts, memories and dreams will become visible via technology – includes footnotes noting scientific and technological advancements

  • -All of your current thoughts as images and movies (2, 3, 8, 9, 18)
  • -All of your memories going back to your birth (1, 4, 9, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25)
  • -Selections of memories related to your genetic code and DNA going back prior to your birth (6, 7)
  • -Aspects of “the collective unconscious” revealed as images and movies (14, 15)
  • -All of the above from versions of yourself as expressed in “the multiverse” (16, 17)
  • -The ability to step into the experience/feelings/needs/thoughts/memories of others (11, 12, 13)
  • – The ability to take every single action, thought, dream of yours in this lifetime AND THEN plot these on a graph SO THAT you see the recurring patterns in our life, GIVING you the ability TO THEN predict future actions, thoughts, dreams of yours (20)
  • How to “shape” the above “experiences” so as to alter your own future? (4, 5, 10, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26)

FOOTNOTES:

1.https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5355ed/memory-editing-technology-will-give-us-perfect-recall-and-let-us-alter-memories-at-will-v24n1

2.https://qz.com/519298/the-story-of-a-man-who-recorded-every-detail-of-his-life-for-five-years/

3.https://www.fastcompany.com/3003772/how-recording-one-second-every-day-could-change-your-life

4.https://singularityhub.com/2018/01/25/heres-the-tech-that-could-one-day-track-boost-or-erase-human-memory/

5.https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6238/1007

6.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_memory_(biology)

7.https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6335/320

8.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/06/29/this-new-device-can-visualize-your-thoughts-sort-of/

9.https://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

10.https://blog.ted.com/8-classic-movies-about-memory-manipulation-and-how-they-inspired-real-neuroscience/

11.https://io9.gizmodo.com/watch-this-disturbing-cyberpunk-movie-about-turning-mem-453474433

12.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction

13.https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150122-the-secret-to-immortality

14.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

15.http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/The-Concept-of-the-Collective-Unconscious.pdf

16.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

17.https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/long-live-the-multiverse/

18.http://techland.time.com/2011/09/23/scientists-can-almost-read-your-mind-turn-thoughts-into-movies/

19.https://psmag.com/social-justice/movies-tomorrow-will-play-mind-79245

20.https://cyclesresearchinstitute.org/pdf/cycles-general/case_for_cycles.pdf

21.https://theconversation.com/heres-why-memories-come-flooding-back-when-you-visit-places-from-your-past-124983

22.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X1930097X

23.https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-deepmind-gamifies-memory-with-its-latest-ai-work/

24.https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/businessweek/upgrade-your-memory-with-a-surgically-implanted-chip-1.1270821

25.https://theconversation.com/scientists-may-soon-be-able-to-predict-your-memories-heres-how-119325

26.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1433-7

Social Listening 2019

SUMMARY OF SOCIAL LISTENING – 2019:

Social listening gives us clues related to our customer, our competitor and our marketplace based on conversation analysis at scale. These clues lead to insights that inform laser specific strategy for ALL silos in the enterprise. In addition, we can build a customer base from conversation analysis by enriching handles of those in the conversation. In addition, we can see who is influencing people talking about our chosen themes/topics.

Sentiment analysis and Emotions analysis gives us insight into what causes Joy, Anticipation, Fear, Disgust, Anger within conversations where our chosen themes and topics are being discussed. This is important because we can design better marketing campaigns, bring efficiency to our overall budget based on what’s working/not working in the marketplace, we can spot trends in the marketplace and anticipate where to focus our resources as a brand.

When we see WHO is talking about themes/topics important to our brand, WHERE these conversations are occurring, WHAT is driving awareness of our themes/topics, HOW customers are arriving to our channels AND to our competitors channels, then we make more intelligent decisions for our brand, for each silo in our enterprise.

Social listening is a process by which insights are derived from truly massive quantities of social data (online conversations, documents, and profiles). We distill these huge amounts of data into digestible insights for business stakeholders, accompanied by detailed datasets of prospects, and individuals/entities who influence these prospects. Software solutions combined with human analysts are our chief means for achieving this work

Our net deliverables are PDFs, spreadsheets and in-person meetings where we deliver insights & recommendations related to our research. These deliverables are important because brand leadership has a set of insights/action steps related to discovered individuals (our initial data lake of prospects). We also meet with stakeholders in various business units to discuss the findings, participate in action teams who are executing on initiatives supported by the insights, adjust process and rinse-repeat as needed, honing in on specific additional items desired. This refinement process is where we really drill into the “2nd concentric ring”* and find the exact targets worth acquiring. This is also where we find out what’s working and what’s not working for a specific unit/team.

*The “2nd concentric ring” is everyone who is following a specific influencer. Segmenting and defining the demographics/psychographics/personalities of every single person following an influencer gives us a better idea about whether this influencer is a good pick for our organization. We also find out a lot more about our ideal consumer when studying the “2nd concentric ring”. This is important because when we see every single person who has chosen to follow and engage with an influencer, we gain insight into the culture, buying choices, and online habits of our ideal consumer.

………..

THE NITTY GRITTY PROCESS 2019 (STEP BY STEP):

1. Define the questions/problem to be answered. This is done by sitting down with the client and interviewing leadership, then specific stakeholders, then those who work with specific stakeholders. It is best to do this in small groups or with individuals so as to get honest and truthful information. This is important because we want to start our study with a very deep set of insights on the organization and those who will be using our research. When I interview stakeholders and their teams on an individuals basis, I learn more than when I interview a group together. When I interview a group together, all of the politics and internal issues prevent individuals from sharing fully what is needed.

2. Define the scope/parameters – dates/topics/desired outcomes. After interviewing everyone, I have insight into how the organization will be most helped by the research work. Very few internal stakeholders and employees in the enterprise have the “big picture” view. Usually each person is interested in his/her own agenda or in pleasing specific senior stakeholders. When we know what is at the heart of the organization’s psyche, it’s heartbeat as it were, then we can deliver a scope of work that truly meets the brand’s need vs. individual stakeholders’ needs. This is important because we want our work to feed the brand, to nourish it’s life. A brand can breathe when fed useful insights, and it can die if it is shielded from useful insights. Truth about the marketplace, the consumer, the competitor, and, importantly, the inner body of stakeholders, employees, vendors, contractors and non-human drivers is vital.

3. Define the audience for the report(s) – who is this for/what is purpose of study/why are we doing this study. Each insights report we deliver will nourish a specific person, unit, division, region. When we know the true need, as stated in the last point, we can speak to the audience who has this need…we can speak to the heart of the organization itself. Knowing one’s audience affects one’s voice, one’s tone, one’s approach. This is important because we want our insights to be digestible, used, passed around. We want our research to truly affect change in the organization, change for the good of the brand.

4. Gather existing pre-study materials from the client and study these. Ask client questions about submitted materials. Gather more materials if needed/available.

5. Create boolean queries for conversation data aggregation in a conversation analysis tool.

6. Refine these boolean queries for more precise conversation data aggregation.

7. Download the raw mentions from the conversation analysis tool.

8. Download other relevant sheets from the conversation analysis tool, including Topics, Most Mentioned Authors, Most Used Hashtags, Leading Authors (in terms of Inf), Leading Sites (blog), Leading Sites (forum), Leading Twitter Authors, Leading Blog Authors, Leading Forum Authors, targeted Mentions downloads (using Rules and sub-queries within the search field in the Mentions tab.

9. Organize conversation data downloads, cleaning up columns, deleting un-needed columns/rows, filtering for site type and putting into separate sheets/tabs in Excel.

10. Enriching the Twitter handles/Instagram handles with additional info about those authors using audience intelligence solutions.

11. If needed, further enriching these titles with add’l social handles using APIs that give us PII (phone, email, address, etc.).

12. Analysis of conversation snippets for insights (junior analysts do this, filling in coding columns and insights columns).

13. Analysis of leading sites.

14. Analysis of leading authors.

15. Upload specific sets of conversation snippets into a tool using the LDA algorithm (Latent Dirichlet Algorithm) for Topic Modeling and Emotions Analysis.

16. Look over analysts’ hand coding work and develop macro insights based upon this work.

17. Look over emotions analysis and topic modeling for add’l insights.

18. Look over the types of people talking (from audience intelligence tools) and add add’l insights.

19. Conduct in-person focus groups, where needed/if required by client (using ideal candidates found from the conversation/audience data analysis).

20. Create final reports with insights, recommendations, appendix and, where needed, the working Excel sheets. Add charts and graphs to Appendix of report.

21. Deliver Insights report to client.

22. Deliver an Excel sheet of the enriched author handles, along with addl charts containing psychographic insights, influencer insights, related to these authors.

23. Deliver Excel sheets from audience intelligence dashboards (includes offline insights from sources like Acxiom and Experian).

24. Go over recommendations one by one with the client.

25. Ask client if there are add’l questions they have. Identify opportunities to collaborate on future research together.