The Socializers | consumer research

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.

SUMMARY: The formula for best-practice audience intelligence work is dynamic, due to rapidly advancing technologies and practices. We also have to take into consideration federal and nation-state regulations which are constantly in flux. As of December 2017, this is a formula for producing a fully enriched audience based on the beginning point of email, social handle, or a conversation snippet from social media, blogs, forums or comment threads on news sites. I might add that the acceleration of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) is rapidly condensing the steps below. APIs (Application Programming Interface) are being woven together to produce highly sophisticated machinery that blends outputs from various data sources.

THE FORMULA (LATE DECEMBER 2017):

STEP 1: Interview the client to determine goals and deliverables. This is important because we want to understand the client’s business and his specific goals related to the research. This is the time to see eye-to-eye with the client and really get to know his/her business from the inside-out.

STEP 2: Perform tests using the software below to discover opportunities related to the client’s desires/needs. Most social monitoring/aud intel solutions provide a way to quickly preview “the universe” related to a specific research request. This step is important as part of putting together the proposal for the client.

STEP 3: Design the audience intelligence study. Gain approval from the client, sign contracts, receive funding from the client. This is important because the client will want to look over the exact type of deliverable he/she will be receiving, as well as hearing a bit about your approach in putting together the final “data lake” of prospects and, of course, how the insights will be presented.

STEP 4: HOW DO PEOPLE DESCRIBE THEMSELVES IN SOCIAL BIOS: We gather a set of social handles where our keywords are in the bio. This from Audiense.com, Affinio, Brandwatch and PeoplePattern primarily, but can also be from using Data-Miner.io in LinkedIn, along with many other sources herein un-named. This is important because self-description by individuals is rather verbose these days..and this is helpful to us in finding our targets. And, where self-description is not verbose, there are clues through company/press/3rd-party descriptions of specific individuals who work for/play at/eat at/drink at/shop at/you-name-it at the locations/venues/places we are studying.

STEP 5: WHAT DO PEOPLE TALK ABOUT IN SOCIAL MEDIA/BLOGS/FORUMS: We gather a set of conversation snippets related to our keywords from Brandwatch, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon and/or Meltwater. This is important because what someone says about an activity/product/service/location/you-name-it contributes towards our understanding of the consumer/customer/competitor’s consumer/customer. In addition, these conversation snippets from social media, forums, blogs, comment threads on news sites form a body of data that we can segment into specific topic groups. These specific topic groups can then be used to form a point of view/set of insights on the target we are studying.

STEP 6: SEGMENTING STEP BY MACHINE – TOPIC MODELING APPLIED TO BIOS & CONVERSATION SNIPPETS: We use Converseon’s Conversus tool to perform topic modeling and separate bios and conversation snippets into discreet topics. This is important because this speeds up the analysis of the bios and separates out the bios that matter to us the most. No solution in the world is more accurate and complete in segmenting bios and conversation snippets into discrete topic groups than Converseon’s Conversus. This solution is pure magic and the analysts at Converseon who are using Conversus are second-to-none in their expertise at building out superior insights based upon the use of their in-house solution. It is during this stage where an analyst begins to really gain deep insight into a sets of bios and sets of conversation snippets.

STEP 7: SEGMENTING STEP BY ANALYST: Now, these analysts wade into the output from Converseon’s Conversus and identify the Topic where our targets are present (and any other discovered target – unknown unknowns). This vital step by humans helps us know which Topic groups in Conversus are populated by our target. This is important work that can be recursive, whereby the analyst segments the data using Conversus, reads through the results, and then segments again to refine even more deeply. I might add that this particular step is where the machine will eventually outstrip the analyst. That outstripping of the analyst will take some time to come along, though. For now, on this step, the human continues to be the last mile.

STEP 8: RE-STITCHING AFTER SEGMENTING STEPS: Reunify the bios from the “right” Topics in Conversus with the handles in the original source data sheet. This is important because we want to have the correct bio next the correct social handle. We also stitch handles and bios next to discovered conversation snippets at this stage. We find that working in Jupyter notebooks using Python is one of the handiest ways for our teams to work together efficiently on this step.

STEP 9: PEOLE PATTERN AUDIENCE INSIGHTS STEP: Upload Twitter AND/OR Instagram handles into PeoplePattern for deeper enrichment of Interests, Location, Age, Persona. This is important because we find out more about each person and we also delineate between Individuals and Organizations. In addition, we move a step closer through PeoplePattern to verifying the “real people”. Finally, we gain insight into the Persona types, Interest groups and lots of other useful info.

STEP 10: FULL CONTACT STEP: Use the Full Contact API to append add’l social handles. The value in this particular step is discovering a full name related to the handle AND additional social handles. We also gain bios from various social media handles, thus bulking out our story about an individual.

STEP 11: PIPL STEP: We use the PIPL API to gather Email, Phone, Address, other social handles, age, and many other bits of info on individuals. This is important because we will gain additional important information about the individuals that verifies they are “real people”.

STEP 12: CRYSTAL STEP: We use the Crystal Knows API to enrich the profiles with DISC personality type, personality overview, messaging guidance, selling guidance. This is important because then we are guiding our client on how best to market, advertise and sell to this individual. We can then group individuals by DISC type, if desired.

STEP 13: CLEAN UP ROWS FOR COMPLETION: Stitch together the results from the various APIs and then filter for complete rows. Again, we use Jupyter notebooks and Python for this work, as the teamwork and efficiency is vastly improved. This stage is important because we want every row to have every cell filled with correct & complete data.

STEP 14: EXACT DATA STEP: If we want to add an extra step for verification at this point, we run the Exact Data enrichment on the emails/names discovered. This is important because this extra step adds validity to the claim that our audience is full of “real people”.

STEP 15: SPOTRIGHT STEP: Upload the social handles into Spotright to gain enrichment of offline Axciom data, such as buying/purchasing styles, net worth, income level, political/religious affiliations, housing info, household complexion info, brand preferences of a specific group uploaded and much much more.

STEP 16: INSIGHTS, METHODOLOGIES & RECOMMENDATIONS PDF: Create 3-5 page Summary PDF with insights related to the research. This is important because brand leadership will now have a set of insights about the discovered individuals (our initial data lake of prospects) and, importantly, we can recommend further research steps for successive work together.