Strategic Network Intelligence

John Ibbitson wrote an interesting article today titled ‘How does U.S. democracy survive without its newspapers? ‘.   Funny really, because most people in my social network today are posting and tweeting about almost the very opposite question:  How blogs are an essential tool for democracy in Iran.

Well, not that funny, because after painting a dismal picture of the print media industry in the US.  Ibbitson concludes that blogs and other web 2.0 based tools will answer the call.

For an interesting graphical analysis of the Iranian election debate I highly recommend reading the Internet and Democracy blog at Harvard: mapping Iran’s election.

Ils l’ont encore fait! Claude Malaison et sa fabuleuse équipe ont encore une fois réussi à nous épater avec le Webcom, un événement devenu incontournable dans l’écologie internationale des conférences sur le Web.

J’ai eu l’honneur cette année d’en faire partie en tant que conférencière. J’ai pu propager la bonne nouvelle au sujet d’Exvisu et de notre méthode d’analyse de données, ainsi que partager quelques réflexions sur l’identité corporative dans un monde de médias sociaux (pendant que Michael réussissait à faire un somme tout en gardant bien en main les commandes du powerpoint). Mieux encore, j’ai fait des rencontres fort intéressantes, notamment celle de Jessica Lipnack. Sa spécialisation au niveau des réseaux organisationnels est l’un de nos principaux champs d’intérêts chez Exvisu, et ma formation en éthique des affaires m’a aussi fait apprécier sa conférence sur la transparence dans l’entreprise.

Autres rencontres sympathiques: Gabe McIntyre (qui a partagé avec nous non seulement ses réflexions sur l’immortalité de l’identité numérique mais aussi quelques pièces maîtresses de son impressionnante collection de t-shirts) et Cyrille de Lasteyrie, alias Vinvin. Le spectaculaire graph Enberg de ce dernier révolutionnera d’ailleurs notre perception de la vie au sein des médias sociaux (ou en tout cas des névroses qu’ils pourraient générer).

Mais le Webcom en tant que conférencière, c’est aussi l’envers du décor, j’ai nommé, la salle des conférenciers, où se trouvaient notamment le vin, les gâteaux, les langues de chat (amenées d’urgence quand j’ai eu fini de manger les gâteaux), Patricia Tessier, sa pâte à dents, et un vidéo en boucle de Vinvin à moitié nu. Quelques privilégiés ont été témoins des compétences acrobatiques de CFD qui conciliait appel sérieux sur son iPhone avec remise en place gracieuse mais efficace de sous-vêtements trop haut remontés. On pouvait aussi trouver dans cette salle mythique une boîte de chocolats que m’avait offerte Michel Chioini; quelqu’un l’a d’ailleurs si bien trouvée qu’il me l’a piquée. L’effort mis dans mon enquête fut inversement proportionnel au vin que Patricia me servait généreusement, ce qui me pousse à conclure de cette partie de Clue gastronomique que la coupable est Patricia, avec sa bouche, dans le petit salon.

Michelle Blanc, quant à elle, a été croisée beaucoup plus souvent dans les toilettes que dans ma présentation. Normalement, ce qui se passe au Webcom reste au Webcom, mais là, je ne peux m’empêcher de m’écrier SCANDALE!

Tout aussi scandaleuse fut l’entrevue accordée à Sandrine Prom Tep, sous la caméra insistante de Christian Aubry, maître es Webcom Live. Écoutez-là bien attentivement… Le scandale est à la toute fin… Pffff, mais non, y’a pas de scandale, mais si vous n’étiez pas à ma conférence (oui, je m’acharne sur ton cas, Michelle), c’est un bon résumé.

Bref, une fantastique conférence, à l’endroit comme à l’envers, et on a déjà hâte à la prochaine. Only at Webcom!

The media/ad/pr/marketing issue of the day in Montreal: astroturfing! This morning in La Presse, Patrick Lagacé revealed that the agency (Morrow Communications) for Stationnement Montréal – the prime movers behind the (awesome) Bixi Public Bicycle system launching this month – created and has managed a fake blog (plus facebook profiles for the “authors”) for several months.

Astroturfing is the practice of creating fake blogs, media and/or personas to promote a message in such a way that it seems spontaneous and unscripted; to have come from the grassroots. The blog, http://www.avelocitoyens.com/ is reasonably well executed – and it looks like they have quickly adjusted to the fact that they were outed… Regardless, astroturf is astroturf, and it’s never appropriate in the blogosphere. It’s unethical, and anyhow it serves the client very poorly, because such fakery WILL come out in the end – leaving the brand with a public relations problem it never should have had.

Ironically, a quote from a Michel Philibert of Stationnement de Montréal points to the real challenge for organizations in a Web 2.0 world: “If we had built a blog hosted by Stationnement de Montréal, nobody would have been interested.”

The challenge for organizations isn’t to try and get around this fact by trying to fake out the very public they’re trying to reach. That’s the easy (and dangerous) way out. The true opportunity is to take on the harder but much more profitable challenge of making traditionally-boring organizations interesting enough to gain our attention. It’s a huge opportunity – and organizations that don’t try to accomplish it are serving themselves, and their clients, very poorly.

The past few weeks have seen an explosion of buzz about Twitter. Then, at the height of the new mass-adoption buzz, along came the Swine Flu – and with it, the pessimists. Typical headlines have been like this: “Swine flu: Twitter’s power to misinform.” Twitter and social media in general have taken a beating over this issue – and quite unfairly, as this analysis shows.

This article and several like it have cherry-picked alarmist and incorrect tweets to make their point, but at Exvisu that kind of anecdotal evidence is never good enough. So I took some Twitter data yesterday to analyze the quality and tenor of the information being spread through Twitter. The answer? Very encouraging.

Lexical Analysis of all tweets near Montreal, April 25-27, 2009 (Click for full-screen version)

To produce this analysis, I took data using the keywords “Swine” or “Porcine” (French for swine), in any language, within 15km of Montreal, anytime between April 25 and April 27 inclusive. This strategy resulted in a dataset of about 560 individual tweets which I analyzed semantically after translating key terms from French to English. This Lexical map represents the 100 most important terms or concepts in the whole Twitter discussion.

The story that emerges is crystal clear. Far from being a worthless mix of junk facts, hype, and hysteria, the Twitter dialog in Montreal is serious, non-alarmist, and concentrates on credible links to published information people want to spread among their network.

The key communications vectors are the AP (@breakingnews), Reuters, the CDC (@cdcemergency), Radio-Canada (here represented by ‘radio’), and Montreal radio station CJAD. As well, one of the most important links in the dataset was to the Google Map of the spread of the H1N1 virus, which by all accounts is a credible, serious reference.

The key actors – particularly those who made news in the timeframe of this analysis – are all very credible and prominent in this discussion by any standard. President Obama, the WHO, various health ministers, and of course the CDC were all visible, while there was very little trace of conspiracy theories or anything like that.

There was some joking and sarcasm – bounded in the map by the dashed red line – but ironically perhaps much of this includes the (small) discussion of Twitter’s power to misinform and people dismissing the whole thing as media hype. Plus, of course, the requisite pig and bacon jokes!

All in all, it’s pretty clear based on this relatively small dataset that the nay-sayers and pessimists are wrong on this one. Anything can (and does) appear in Twitter feeds – but to dismiss the service based on a few alarmist or jokey tweets is seriously misguided. Overall, Twitter seems to be an impressive and sober channel for up-to-the-minute information, alerts, and discussion on an important issue like Swine Flu.

Last Friday I attended a monthly concert/party hosted at a luthier’s atelier in the garment district side of Mile End with my buddy and band mate Al Kohl of Loaded Films. We had the good fortune to meet Amy Vickberg and Jen Hamilton of Place magazine.

As luck would have it, Place magazine’s headquarters are in the same building (at Jen’s loft). Amy and Jen showed us the latest issues, but when I saw the Montreal Musical Mitosis project my eyes were glued to the work. What I saw before me was a hand drawn network graph of Montreal bands, with links between them that were representative of common band members. There are at least 150 bands on the graph.

The network graph was recently blown up and projected on a wall and various musicians were asked to draw links. Amy is also currently asking musicians to fill in links, in that sense the work is an ongoing piece and fits naturally with a web 2.0 crowdsourcing project, just completely offline! Amazing!

Naturally Place’s next issue is on tribes and communities, and they are looking for contributors… Does anyone of the Montreal Web 2.0 tribe want to submit something?

If so: submissions@placemag.org. The work should be b/w and 300dpi.

Although there has been discussion about problems in the newspaper business for a decade or more, the volume has really ramped up in the past few months as the financial crisis has put a lot of sterling properties on their back foot.

Claude was looking through an old issue of Monocle the other day and came across a great piece by Tyler Brûlé (an old friend and neighbour of mine from high school days) that anticipated the current crisis by several months and made some really sound suggestions for how newspapers can regain some of their mojo in the current climate.

Brûlé wrote (in December 2007), “2008 may well be the year that some established dailies decide to give up the game and either go under or completely digital.” His suggestion? “…We’d suggest a high-quality 20-page broadsheet… with no ads smaller than full-page, lots of analysis and even more ink on the page.”

Newspaper revitalization is a constant topic of discussion here in our office at Exvisu. Our weblog and Twitter analysis work consistently demonstrates that most big-issue stories have clear traces in both blogs and microblogs before newspapers ever get to print on a subject – a fact that newspapers must find a way to leverage.

Moving towards a format such as the one Brûlé suggested, complemented by a truly authoritative online presence, would go a long way to ensuring that the good work that newspapers have always done will not simply disappear.

To be authoritative in their markets, newspapers should increase the analysis and contextualization work they do and prospectively search and publish links (in the online edition) to the most important opinion pieces in the blogosphere related to any topic. This would create an ecosystem that they organize and focus – and from which they could profit once again.

During the US election and up to Obama’s Inauguration, Exvisu did a few studies to demonstrate the kind of intelligence we generate. We’ve collected English versions of these in a single PDF – some of our original posts were in French. One thing that’s important to note is that our source data for these analyses included both the blogosphere – the ‘traditional’ source for Exvisu – and Twitter, which is proving to be an extremely rich source of data to analyze.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving my first academic seminar since my days as an astrophysicist, to the GéPS group at HEC.  So what is an astrophysicist doing giving a talk to the management and strategy group at a business school?

Well, talking about how blogs are changing the nature of strategic information of course!

Over the two hours of the seminar, I presented our recent PDAC study and the history of our work starting with co-citation analysis, ANT and then co-word analysis and how techniques initially designed to model and explain scientific collaboration are perfectly adaptable for exploring the range of actors in social media and quantifying blog buzz, and how these forms of collective intelligence are key for decision makers today.

In attendance Professors Wendy Reid, David Oliver, Ann Langley, YulBiz’s own Muriel Ide,  LVL Studio’s François Bédard and our good friend David McFarlane.

Many thanks to Professor Pamela Sloan for inviting me to speak.

Next week I will be speaking at McGill’s PhD entrepreneur Panel.

This week Exvisu is happy to be participating in PDAC ‘09, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s annual International convention being held at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. One of our main areas of focus at Exvisu is to help companies to integrate the vast online discussions to help make their operations more sustainable and more socially responsible. We believe – and can produce the data to demonstrate – that a key starting point for sustainable development is to learn as much as possible about the preoccupations of real people – whether they’re in a company’s local community, traditional stakeholders, or financial analysts from the other side of the globe.

PDAC has made a big commitment to sustainability in exploration activities with its e3 Plus Framework for Responsible Exploration, which is being launched this week. Exvisu was invited to contribute an analysis of the discussion on the blogosphere about mining exploration activities, and our report is featured prominently at the convention – a summary brochure is included in all of the delegate bags and the final report is available for download immediately. Go to our PDAC page to download a PDF presentation of our findings.

Le titulaire de la Chaire de commerce électronique RBC Groupe Financier aux HEC, Sylvain Sénécal, a mentionné Exvisu dans un article publié ce matin dans La Presse.

Intitulé “La prise de pouvoir des consommateurs“, cet article insiste sur l’importance, pour une entreprise, d’être à l’écoute des consommateurs qui s’expriment sur le Web:

“la prise de pouvoir des consommateurs est là pour de bon et les entreprises devront s’adapter à cette réalité en utilisant ces nouveaux outils technologiques et ces sources de données abondantes afin de bâtir des meilleures relations avec leurs clients.”

Sylvain Sénécal mentionne Exvisu comme une entreprise d’ici capable d’aider les entreprises à recueillir et maîtriser les informations disponibles dans ce nouvel environnement.