Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 social innovation. Edited by jérémy dumont, strategic planner in FRANCE

Enjoy all PARIS 2.0 on line. The next social media forum is coming soon....

http://www.psst-ressources.fr

Successful innovations meet with “social imaginaries” by Stéphane Hugon, sociologist and managing consultant

Stéphane Hugon is a reckognized sociologist, researcher, and teacher at both Descartes-Sorbonne Paris University and Paris National Design School (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) focusing on linking innovative technology with consumer usages.

Stéphane cofounded consulting agency Eranos, specialized in analyzing relationship between innovative technology and consumer imaginaries.

In this post, Stéphane explains how successful innovations in various areas (Web, Mobile, human-machine interface for vehicle) tackle with social transformation and personal identity, meeting with “social imaginaries”, and reversely, how imaginaries analysis allows to anticipate social adoption of new technologies.

How can we define social imaginaries?

We are living in a world of change, of mutation, which is a great opportunity, as well as being a challenge. It has been often said that our way of life has changed more in the last decade than since the end of the second world war. It is also said that this change manifests itself in the small things, the details, the small gestures that populate everyday life. Indeed, it is the slight and everyday nature of these gestures and ways of living that increases the depth of these mutations, making them more profound, more radical and more deeply rooted.

The mutation is difficult to understand, because it is not simply an economic metric. One way to understand these changes – technological, sociological, organisational – consists of using the resources of the sociology of imagination1.  The imaginary is at first sight a paradoxical notion, because it shares the structures, signs and meanings which give coherence and reality to cultural phenomena. Nevertheless, it is this shared bank of meanings that gives it its interprative strength.

If we were to try and give a definition, we could say that the social imaginary is the corpus of images shared by a particular group, and that give to this group the same references, the same vision of reality, and the reflexive understanding of everything that appears in their environment.

Once given imaginary is a “collective treasury of images, myths, narrative structures”, would you connect it as well to the “prisme” metaphor?

The imaginary is the interprative mechanism for selective filtration and understanding through which people communicate, build confidence and construct society.

The imaginary is culture. The imaginary is in a sense the “hidden treasure” of the public, of society; it is the collective unconscious, that enable understanding, and the discovery of cohesion and coherence.

Collective images and shared beliefs facilitate the global understanding of our environment. In a word, social imaginary creates the experience of the same implicit codes, with no explanation being necessary.

What is the link between imaginaries and innovation?

The imaginary is the unspoken which produces shared conviction. And if the imaginary is specific to different groups that means that we can analyse it, we can store it, we can create imaginary history, and study its sociology.

This is a topic of great contemporary interest in the field of technological innovation, because for a long time the supply of technologies followed a pattern of adoption according to the metric of scarcity of availability. Technology was closely linked to a certain idea of skills and learning, and for this reason preserve of a select group – the educated, the mature, the technicians.

But today the context has changed. Since the industrial revolution, the centres of innovation in usage of technology has been based in companies and professional groups, who have had the monopoly on access to technology, and sole posession of the skills to use and produce tools and technology. The directors of IT at the end of the last century noticed that the function of innovation has since left this specific environment: innovation has migrated from its hitherto corporate haven, and has to build its legitimacy in a broader social imaginary.

Considering technological innovation addresses a larger market, does it pave the way for a new world of co-innovation?

With it, also, has gone the skills and skill processes and the innovative dynamics of appropriation and the transformation of usages. This is one of the most interesting lessons we may learn from the Internet: to have demonstrated that public exposure to technology should result in mutual enlargement and transformation.

Now we have an environment wherein the audience enhances and creates new uses for technology, as well as technology changing the audience.

The figure of the adolescent, expansion in distribution, and the idea of  “DIY”, are key elements for innovation in technology and services today. At this moment, an analysis of the key imaginary structures behind this could be helpful.

What are the implications of the era of “intensive innovation” that we are living in?

In the context of a saturated market-place, the main driver of what constitutes a pertinent technological offer are the aspects of it which make it immediately understandable by the public. Time to market.

Because of that, contemporary users are no longer willing to accept conditions whereby they must undergo a long period of learning, adaptation and self-aclimitisation. For example, it used to be the case that if your work involved use of computers, this was a specialised task which required you to undergo special training for this type of complex, delicate and bulky operation. Now, it is an requisite of most  employees to be “computer literate”.

The time of appropriation could be immediate, so we should tend toward a having a very tight learning curve. This is the design concept of “affordance”, which we may understand in this context as the capacity of an object, a service, interface, economic model to be immediately ingrained in a legitimate way in the mind of the users. Plug and play.

As “immediate meaning” seems required for innovation, what role does design play to shape straightforward and intuitive innovations?

The offering by itself – its form, its verbalisation, its design – induces a promise, technical details, and the way to use it; coextensive understanding with the culture of usage.

One quality of the technological aspect is that it does not challenge the fundamental convictions and perceptions of the users, but rather reveals their unconscious hopes.

This is the capacity of innovation to access the unconscious recognition of need, and memory of usage – the term ‘in’ which has been noted by Michel Maffesoli. When contemporary economists have focused their attention on ‘novation’, they have often forgotten the ‘in’. That means whatever the qualities of the new offering, it will only come to life if it can grow roots in the ‘in’ of usage and social representation. In short, the social imagination.

What tools can we leverage on to build innovations encountering imaginaries?

The most important objective for those seeking to produce innovation, is to do nothing! To take the time to listen and to observe the social and symbolic background which is said to recieve and take part in the offering. This is a phase in the cartography of the social imagination, in other words the map of consumer imaginaries.

In that way, innovation is very close to identification. The manner in which people accept the offer is an index of legitimacy.

Indeed, technology could be considered as a living space, which is realized through the people’s belief in and contribution to it. In order to be activated, to actually come into contact with its audience, the offer must give space to its users – even if they are mass audience.

We have the technology we deserve; this is reflected in the social history of technology.

What is the dynamic of social imaginary?

These images are dynamic, they are manifested in the myths and figures – for example, the myth of the hero, or that of the performance. This mythology of imaginary is a living ecosystem – it lives and it dies. It is transfigured, as with the wellspring metaphor which has been thoroughly analysed by Gilbert Durand.

However, such an innovation is not limited to the fuction of a mirror, it is also a fuction of verbalisation – revealing – the innovation should speak to you.  A relevation, in the photographic sense of the term, that produces images which are latent, unconscious; the real architecture of relationships between persons. Sociology of imagination gives us the ability to create maps of how people share images and structures in the social imagination.

Contemporary usages of technology and innovation are not free from these dynamics. They too share issues which lie at the heart of this problematic. We talked about mutation; the sociology of imagination has identified certain passages and inversion.

This means the end of the functionalist promise of technology by example. For example, the success of Apple does not come from its technical power, neither does the sucess of the recent Nintendo wii platform. The individual subject had been by now thoroughly saturated as an actor, prefiguring profiles, avatars, sessions, users and communities.

Hence, we see the return of analogic and corporal: sensitive interfaces, or the disappearance of interfaces altogether, the emergence of gestures and vocals, the legitimacy of playfulness, of gameplay as a social act. This gives rise to the creation of new spaces – the game as a tool for engagement, a social practice. These are the big trends, but it is also possible to identify elements specific to niche and discreet audiences and publics.

What social trends shall we incorporate, what are the weak signals to decode?

The imaginary is coextensive with social life. This allows the mediation between objects, services and the public. The purpose of the situation we find ourselves in is not simply to submit to all of these representations. It is also an opportunity to access closer proximity to the reality which the user projects upon interfaces.

We have to decode weak signals on 3 levels: psychology, anthropology, history:

• For example, psychological signals of mutation include new models like  regressive behavior, connectivity, sociability, addiction.
• Anthropology observation show merger with nature, symbolism, paganism, rituals.
• Or history filter leads to concepts of  tribes, altruism, mutants, collective creation, opportunistic timing (“hic et nunc”, cairos, interstitial utopia).

More than individual identities and needs, technological innovation have to involve social links.

On the other hand, the way we access and give reality to these phantoms allow us to escape the dynamics of appropriation and usage, and can help us to anticipate and to identify the value given to an offer by the user. In other words, it can allow us to see just beyond the horizon, to the forthcoming offers of technology, and the services of tomorrow.

1 The sociology of imagination is the study of the imaginary structures which run through the entire social body, bearing a huge imfluence on things like trust, meaning and shared understanding.

Wif 2010 conference

Video with English translation

More Th>n launches flagship social experience for their Pet Insurance product

http://blog.gamaroff.co.uk/?p=53

Users can upload and talk about their pets

Aptly named social network exclusively for British furry friends, Pet Profiles, was launched this week by innovative social experience agency Gamaroff Digital for their client More Th>n. Deeply integrated with Facebook®, the rich application is set to establish the insurance giant as a social leader not just in their industry, but in social media as a whole.

People nationwide who devote hours of online conversation to their animals are for the first time being given a feature-rich platform to show them off and to compete against others in on-going competitions
throughout the year.

Friends can search pets by breed or keyword, view their likes and dislikes, read about their character traits and also vote whenever there is an active competition. More importantly, pet lovers can engage in discussions on each animal – the thread of which is streamed on their Facebook Wall to engage a wider audience.

“This product has been designed to draw on the most up-to-date learnings in social brand engagement today.” says Joe Tuson, Technical Director at Gamaroff. “There is a competition element which we see a lot of on Facebook, but it is so much more than that because the core insight upon which it is based is inherently social – that is, people cannot resist talking about and showing off their pets.”

People are free to upload their pets and can do so by selecting an image from their Facebook albums. They create a profile much like a person’s Facebook Profile, but with a cuddly twist. Once submitted, these can be browsed and searched in a fast and slickly designed interface.

The most Liked pets appear in a real-time leaderboard and these are awarded prizes such as free pet insurance for a year – tying neatly into More Th>n’s brand proposition.

“Aside from the seamless integration with Facebook, the conversations, the photos and competitions,” Tuson says, “we also believe the product deserves some recognition in the development community with respect to the overall user experience and speed. It employs modern mobile-friendly coding practices yet manages to remain fluid and intuitive throughout.

“Practically everything has been considered to enhance the user experience. The paging system is responsive and dynamic and even responds to the mouse-wheel to navigate smoothly through multiple pages. The criteria used in each search appear as breadcrumbs enabling quick and easy filtering. The page automatically adjusts in height when these are fewer results to avoid unsightly white space and subtle animations at each interaction make the whole system feel like an iPhone app.”

More Th>n has for long been credited for standing out in the insurance industry due to their well-executed advertising campaigns and now with Pet Profiles they are able to maintain this image within social media too.

It proves that all brands, regardless of sector, are able to stand out as innovators in today’s social world if they first tap into their consumer’s core insight and harness it in the right way.

More Th>n’s social experience agency, Gamaroff Digital, have been selected by Facebook as part of the Preferred Consultant Program, to which only 90 companies belong worldwide. Their work includes social campaigns for such brands as Coca Cola, Guinness, Vodafone and more.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

What now? What next? Bringing together those from across marketing, comms, PR, customer services & beyond

 

Head of UK Communications, McDonald's	Interactive Marketing Manager, Unilever
Industry Manager, Google	Head of Social Marketing, Coral Racing
Trade Marketing Manager, News International	Head of Marketing & Communications, The Landmark Trust
Digital Communications Manager - EMEA, Harley-Davidson	Manager Global Media Relations, Novartis International
Head of Social Media, EURO RSCG	Global CEO, Hall & Partners
Digital Marketing Manager, RBS	Head of Publicity, Freeview

---

At Social Brands, we will be bringing together the brands that are truly social, those that are tying buzz to business results, those that are looking at engagement rather than numbers and those who are not just monetising activity but can track a real ROI. Over 26 brands including Unilever, M&S, 02, BT and First Direct will be sharing their expertise, answering your questions and debating the latest challenges when it comes to social media for communications, PR, marketing, customer services and beyond!

Programme highlights:

Question the biggest hitters, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook will be answering your burning questions on how brands can optimise performance online and will delve into how the channels will be evolving

Who should own social media? Join one of the biggest debates in the social space – discover how leading brands are structuring their social media strategy to streamline and optimise activity

Measurement made clear: Counting likes or tweets isn’t enough – learn how to move beyond soft measures and prove your reach, engagement and ROI

Global Head of Brand, Aviva delves into their global campaign ‘You Are The Big Picture,’ a highly ambitious integrated campaign which placed social media at the heart of it’s strategy – hear their high’s and low’s and what they have learnt 18 months on

Tailor your day: choose from streamed seminars including social commerce, social CRM, mobile, crisis communications, video and content

Don't miss our separately-bookable pre- and post-event workshops:

How To Win Friends & Influence People In 140 Characters!
Pre-Event Twitter Workshop: 7 February 2012
View agenda here

How Can I Help? Using Social Media To Engage Customers & Drive Business Impact
Post-Event Social CRM Workshop: 9 February 2012
View agenda here

 

 

Wednesday 8 February
08.15	Registration
09:00	Editor's Opening Remarks   Danny Rogers, Editor in Chief, Brand Republic Group
09:10	Chair's Opening Remarks Debbie Weinstein, Senior Director, Global Media Innovation, Unilever
09:20	Who Should Own Social Media? The Big Battle Between Collaboration & Ownership Although most agree that not one department owns social – doesn’t the buck have to stop somewhere? What are each discipline’s social objectives and how can you align these? What involvement should agencies have and what type of agency is best placed to handle your social media activity? How can you optimise and streamline activity? Tom Glover, Deputy Director of Communications & Head of Digital Communcations, Financial Times Juan Ramlill, Senior Manager, Global Digital Marketing, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Amanda Brown, Head of PR, First Direct
10:00	Measuring Reach, Engagement & ROI – What Calculator Should You Be Using? You may think your social media activity is working but are you confident that you can systematically prove its value and ROI? With measurement getting more and more sophisticated what are some of the formulas being used by those ahead of the game and can you really move beyond soft measures? Making social smarter: measuring reach and engagement Tying buzz to business results: when counting likes or tweets isn’t enough! Assessing the indirect impact of your social media activity on customer engagement, sales and the bottom line From data to dollar value: using social media data to more effectively drive business results and optimise your ROI Jeremy Waite, Head of Social Media, Phones4U Stephen England-Hall, Chief Client Officer, Syncapse Corp Claire Dennison, Social Media Manager, MORE TH>N
10:35	Morning Refreshments
11.00	Fourth Base James Warren, Chief Creative Officer, Digital, Weber Shandwick, will discuss the similarities between social media and teenage sex; everyone's talking about it, very few are doing it and almost none are doing it well. Based on insights gained from proprietary research, James will talk about how to successfully build social into your brand. James Warren, Chief Creative Officer, Digital, Weber Shandwick
	Pick ‘N’ Mix Sessions: Tailor Your Day From A Selection Of Social Media Sessions * Choose from sessions A, B or C at 11:30 and between D, E and F at 12:20.
11:30 A)	Content Is King & Dialogue Is His Queen: How To Get It Right On Social Media  Avoiding content fatigue: steps to ensure that you are creating innovative and engaging content  Keeping the masses engaged across different platforms whilst remaining consistent with your brand  Developing a long-term content strategy across all departments without stifling creativity Alex Pearmain, Head of Social Media, 02 UK Charles Williams, Editorial Manager, Communications Coordination, British Red Cross Sophie Brendel, Head of Digital Engagement, BBC
11:30 B)	Setting Up Shop: Driving Revenue Through Social Commerce Assessing if social commerce is right for your brand  - what are the opportunities?  - what is the future? Who is the social shopper and how can you tap into their behaviours and motivations? What role do vouchers and incentives play in social commerce? Sienne Veit, Head of New Technology Business Development, Marks and Spencer Julia Monro, Community Manager, Marks and Spencer
11:30 C)	Technology & Services Showcase Want to know what goes on behind the scenes to amplify your brand through social media? Explore and sample the latest tools available to ensure you stay ahead of the game!
12:20 D)	Social CRM: Using Social Media For Customer Engagement & Relationship Management What is Social CRM really? Developing the right Social CRM strategy – how should this be done? What Social CRM database should you be using and how can you integrate this into your existing system?  - how do you best budget for this and prove its value? Monitoring and managing Social CRM  - assessing the tools available  - monitoring response rates and turnaround times Bian Salins, Head of Social Media Innovation, BT Customer Service
12:20 E)	Video: Creating the Viral Effect What are the key components? What is the potential for your brand? Is it actually engaging your audience and delivering a ROI or just gaining hype amongst the wrong audience? Speaker To Be Announced
12:20 F)	Social Media: The Boardroom Verdict Top tips for demonstrating the business impact of social media to the boardroom - what can you evidence? - justifying headcount and spend - proving ROI Overcoming knowledge gaps and gaining boardroom buy-in Ben Carter, Head of Central Online Marketing, Betfair
13:10	Lunch
	Pick ‘N’ Mix Sessions: Tailor Your Afternoon From A Selection Of Social Media Sessions * Choose from sessions G, H and I at 14:10 and between J, K and L at 15:00.
14:10 G)	The Social Media Technology Showcase Want to know what tools your competitors are using to amplify their brand through social media? Explore and sample the latest technology available to ensure you stay ahead of the game!
14:10 H)	Mobile: The Future Is….? Assessing why, who and when audiences engage with social media on their mobile What’s really in it for the brand and consumer? Identifying how social media is evolving for mobile and how to utilise it as a marketing tool How can your brand engage with consumers through location-based social tools? Simon James, Head of Shopping Comparison, moneysupermarket.com
14:10 I)	Legal Issues, Ethical Issues: Red Flags & Best Practices Brush up on the basics of what you can and can’t do on social media Understanding how intellectual property law effects social media What to do if things go wrong Nick Stringer, Director of Regulatory Affairs, IAB Phil Sherrell, Partner, Bird & Bird
15:00 J)	Using Social Media To Monitor & Manage Your Brand’s Reputation Before, During & After A Crisis In this session Visa Europe shares insights on: How to manage your reputation online: dealing with the speed of information circulating on social media The dos and don’ts of how to use social media to react and respond when a crisis does occur Simon Kleine, VP Corporate Communications, Visa Europe Amanda Kamin, Head of Issues Management, Visa Europe
15:00 K)	Gamification Unboxed: Over-Hyped Or The Future Of Interactivity? Gamification and social media have played a role in marketing in the past, but not like today. Debate whether gaming has a future for brands, hear how brands are using social gaming and discover 5 top tips to use this tool to create long-term brand engagement. Speaker To Be Announced
15:00 L)	Understanding & Influencing The Social Audience: Why Consumer Behaviour Trends Can Revolutionise Your ROI Get to grips with the social, cognitive and emotional factors around how and why your social audience behaves like it does and understand how to really influence purchasing and usage choices. Speaker To Be Announced
15:50	Afternoon Refreshments
16:20	Top Tips for Integrating & Distributing Social Media Across All Your Touchpoints: The Aviva Story When consumer trust in the financial industry was at an all-time low Aviva launched their global campaign ‘You Are The Big Picture,’ this highly ambitious campaign made social media central to its strategy rather than a tactical delivery mechanism and proved to be a great success. Now 18 months on they share the highs and lows of the campaign and explain how they effectively integrated and embedded social media into the heart of their marcomms activity and what positive impact it had on their overall campaign. Virginia Barnes, Global Head of Brand, Aviva
16:50	Social Media Sofa: What Now, What Next? Social media channels are continuously and rapidly evolving so what’s next? Ensure that you have the latest information on how the social space is going to be shaped and how these changes will affect your brand. Hear straight from the horses’ mouth on what the social platforms have planned for 2012 and beyond, and how you can remain one step ahead in the brand race! How are current social media channels evolving? What is the future for social commerce and monetising content? Assessing emerging channels What’s happening on the international front? Peter Fitzgerald, Country Sales Director, Google UK Pete Devery, Corporate PR Lead, Microsoft EMEA Joshua Graff, Director, Marketing Solutions EMEA, LinkedIn Stephen Haines, UK Commercial Director, Facebook
17:30	Chair's Closing Remarks & End Of Conference

3 Metrics that Will Change the Way You Market on Facebook

by Amy Porterfield 

1,091
inShare

Share on Tumblr

email

share

inShare1,091

Share on Tumblr

email

share

Amy Porterfield is the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies and creator of the Facebook marketing training program, FBinfluence. You can join her on Facebook at facebook.com/AmyPorterfield or read her blog at AmyPorterfield.com.

Facebook isn’t just the largest social networking site on the web (with more than 800 million active users); it also collects a massive amount of information about those users. Through the newly revamped Facebook Insights, Page owners can access a staggering amount of information about their fans’ activities. This information gives business owners valuable insight into what they need to do to give fans a better experience and, in turn, achieve better marketing results.

But it can be challenging to sift through all that data. An easy way to avoid metrics overdose is to find and target just a few key metrics.

Below is an overview of three game-changing metrics you should be tracking, along with concrete tips for improving your Page’s performance in each area.

---

1. Track ”People Talking About This”

---

People Talking About This is one of the new metrics for Facebook Pages. Unlike other metrics on your Insights dashboard, it’s also the only one visible to the public.

This number represents the total number of people who, over the past seven days, have engaged with your Page in any way — by Liking it, commenting on or sharing a post, answering a question, tagging your Page, or responding to an event. In your Insights dashboard, you’ll also see a percentage increase or decrease next to the current number, so you can compare this week’s engagement against last week’s stats.

If you want to build a thriving community on Facebook — or if you want to turn existing fans into raving super fans — engagement is the most critical metric you can track. And People Talking About This is a good measure of overall engagement.

Luckily, the best way to increase engagement is easy: Just ask.

Ask your fans questions, request their opinions, and ask people to click. Don’t post, “I’m excited about the Superbowl this year!” Instead, write, “Click Like if you’re excited about the Superbowl this year!” You can also ask people to share your content. I might write, “If you found this tip useful, make sure to share it with your friends.” Inserting mini calls-to-action reminds your audiences to act, not just read.

Tip: Never let a post go unattended — meaning, when someone does comment, Like or share your post, reach out to him personally and acknowledge his action with a thank you, or use it as an opportunity to expand the conversation. But whatever you do, don’t leave fans hanging.

---

2. Track “Engaged Users”

---

On your Insights dashboard, you’ll see a chart in the Page Post Information area with a column called “Engaged Users.” The number represents the number of unique people to have clicked anywhere on that post. (Note: Insights only tracks this for 28 days.)

Hint: If you click on the number itself, you’ll also see a pie chart with types of clicks, including “other,” which counts the clicks not included in any other metric (clicking on someone’s name, for example). This shows you how many people are really paying attention, even if they don’t comment or click Like.

Engaged Users is another engagement-related metric, but since it tracks actual clicks, you can see how your audience interacts with your posts — and use this information to craft more engaging calls-to-action.

Tip: Target posts to your ideal audience. If you’re not getting steady, increasing clicks on your posts over time, the most likely culprit is that you’re not giving your audience members the information they need.

To create more targeted posts, ask yourself:

• Who is my ideal audience? Age? Male/Female? Location?
• What type of information do they want from me?
• What are the main challenges I can solve for them?

Instead of guessing the answers, collect feedback online or use Facebook polls to find out more about what your audience is actually looking for.

---

3. Track “External Referrers”

---

Click on Reach (under Insights in your sidebar) and scroll down to find “External Referrers.” You’ll see a list that shows how many times people arrived on your Facebook Page from an external site during a selected date range.

All business owners should know where and how people are finding them online. While it’s important to direct traffic from social media to your main “hub,” whether it’s a blog or a static business site, bringing traffic onto your Facebook Page is also important.

Why? Because Facebook allows you to have conversations and build relationships that you just can’t have on a regular website. Those conversations can yield powerful market insights and, eventually, lead to actual sales.

Tip: Actively drive traffic to Facebook. Start by determining where your current referrals are coming from, and then ask yourself whether you’re doing all of the following.

• Am I optimizing my Facebook Page so that when Google indexes Facebook, users find my Page too? Make sure to include keyword-rich information on your “Info Tab” to help users find you easily.
• Am I doing enough outside of my website and Page to bring traffic in? One way to do this is by guest posting to blogs in your niche, especially highly trafficked blogs. In general, getting yourself out there is good, whether by webinars, teleconferences, interviews or free online trainings. Each is a great forum for driving more traffic to your Facebook Page — and you can get feedback on participant experiences when they stop by.
• Does my website account for some of my referrals? If not, make some changes to your business site. Add a Like box social plugin, include share buttons, and of course, display your social icons in a visible place on every page.

Have you started actively monitoring Insights yet? Which metrics have yielded the most valuable business insights? Share your experience in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, GOIABA (Goiabarea)

Decoding Our Chatter. Want to monitor an earthquake, track political activity or predict the ups and downs of the stock market? Researchers have found a bonanza of real-time data in the torrential flow of Twitter feeds.

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

When Virginia's magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit last August, the first Twitter reports sent from people at the epicenter began almost instantly at 1:51 p.m.—and reached New York about 40 seconds ahead of the quake's first shock waves, according to calculations by the social media company SocialFlow. The flood of messages peaked at 5,500 tweets a second.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204138204576598942105167646.html#ixzz1jovchyiP

Getty Images

Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

The first terse tweets also outpaced the U.S. Geological Survey's conventional seismometers, which normally can take from two to 20 minutes to generate an alert. The agency is now experimenting with Twitter as a faster and cheaper way to track earthquakes.

Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

As Twitter's message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly studies over the past 18 months by computer-network analysts and sociologists have plumbed the public torrents of data made available by Twitter through special links with the company's computer servers. This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box-office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market.

When the magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake hit last year, researchers found that on Twitter the truth often won out over misinformation. "When a rumor is true, it spreads faster," said computer analyst Barbara Poblete at the University of Chile in Santiago.

Ms. Poblete and her colleagues analyzed how survivors of the earthquake used the messaging service in lieu of more conventional communications that had been knocked out. They discovered that in the crisis, Twitter crowds reflexively sorted facts from falsehoods, exercising a collective wisdom on the fly. She found enough measurable differences in language, citations and posting patterns to devise a way to assess the credibility of Twitter texts automatically, with an accuracy of about 70%.

"The network itself can provide a filter for valid information," Ms. Poblete said.

All of this data is also proving to be valuable in the marketplace. Hundreds of social media, data-mining and financial-services companies now are paying a base rate of up to $360,000 a year for Twitter's information, according to executives at the two companies that are licensed to market it world-wide—Gnip Inc. in Boulder, Colo., and Datasift in Reading, U.K. "Twitter is protective of who has the data and where it is going," said Nick Halstead, chief operating officer at DataSift. "It is the ultimate customer research tool."

In an era of digital deception, scientists at Indiana University are using Twitter to investigate the nature of truth, lies and politics. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

Though the practice is still experimental, Twitter data already have become a key variable in behavioral finance investment formulas. "The hedge funds are leading the way," said Chris Moody, chief operating officer at Gnip. Mr. Moody declined to name Gnip's financial customers. "They don't want anyone to know their secret sauce," he said.

The company does supply Twitter data to an investment firm in London called Derwent Capital Markets, which set up a $40 million hedge fund in May that openly uses a Twitter-based formula to guide its investment decisions.

Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Manchester who developed the fund's technique say that they can reliably predict changes in the stock market by up to four days, based on the ups and downs of the national mood as expressed through key words in texts sent by 130,000 regular Twitter users.

View Interactive

"We can make these predictions in real time, and I think it can be leveraged by a hedge fund to gain an advantage in the market," said Indiana computer scientist Johan Bollen, an adviser to the Derwent fund who helped to pioneer the sentiment analysis technique. "We have become more confident that this actually works."

After its first full month of trading in July, the investment firm announced that it had out-performed the Standard & Poor's 500 for that month, returning 1.85% while the index fell 2.2%.

Researchers led by Bernardo Huberman at Hewlett-Packard's Social Computing Laboratory have used Twitter to predict box office hits and flops. They successfully forecast the financial fate of 24 films, including "The Blind Side" and "New Moon," by analyzing the intensity of the word-of-mouth about them on Twitter. "We are interested in doing the same thing for products," said Dr. Huberman.

Other researchers remain skeptical of Twitter's purported predictive power.

Enlarge Image

Close

This summer, for example, researchers at Wellesley College in Massachusetts examined the Twitter traffic during six close congressional elections last year, trying to see if the volume and emotional tone of the messages related to each race could have been used to predict the outcomes. In all, they analyzed a quarter million messages involving more than 60,000 people.

"Twitter did no better than chance," reported computer scientist Eni Mustafaraj, who led the research.

The military has recognized Twitter as a new battlefield for information warfare. In July, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began exploring the possibility of a $42 million effort to detect online "persuasion campaigns" and "influence operations" aimed at spreading ideas through Twitter and other social media. The agency also wants to develop new technology for automatically "counter-messaging" adversaries.

Tweeting the Tremors

• 'Omg earthquake!!!'
• 'Coworker: Was that an earthquake?? Me: Not sure, let me check Twitter.'
• 'Read about earthquake on Twitter before I felt it in Boston.'
• '1:51 Earthquake. 1:54 First Earthquake jokes hit Internet. 2:05 Everyone is already sick of Earthquake meme.'

"Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions," said DARPA spokesman Eric Mazzacone in a written response to questions. "Adversaries may exploit social media and related technologies for disinformation."

At Southeastern Louisiana University, researchers reported that they could track influenza outbreaks by collating the rise in Twitter texts from people complaining about flu symptoms as effectively as more conventional public health reporting methods used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Unlike other instant-messaging systems, email, Facebook or Google, the personal information sent through Twitter accounts is public by default. Anyone with a free account can tap into the streams of conversation, merge themes or introduce new topics by employing short codes called hashtags, which are used to earmark subjects of discussion.

Twitter's Divided Politics

View Interactive

Twitter's Global Moods

View Interactive

More photos and interactive graphics

"With Twitter, you have a microphone, in effect, above all the millions of conversations that are going on during a day," said computer scientist Alan Mislove at Northeastern University in Boston, who uses the messaging service to track rumors, national moods and commercial brand information. "These pieces of information don't reveal much by themselves, but when you add them together they reveal quite a lot, and that's when it starts to get scary."

Last year, in an analysis of over 300 million tweets, Mr. Mislove and his colleagues found that people's moods follow consistent patterns over the hours of a day (with the highest levels of happiness in early morning and late evening) and the days of the week. The mood of each tweet was inferred by keywords like love, paradise and suicide. And, they found, people on the West Coast were significantly happier than people on the East Coast.

Researchers concede that their studies have some limitations. Twitter users tend to be younger adults, urban, more affluent and less likely to have children; they are not a cross-section of society as a whole. Still, researchers say, there is considerable diversity—demographic, national and cultural—among those who use the service, and it is possible to make meaningful generalizations from the flow of their messages.

No one is sure exactly how many of Twitter's 200 million or so registered user accounts are active at any one time and how many are dummy accounts. Twitter recently acknowledged that only half send messages. Some account holders aren't even human. Automated software programs called "bots," designed to spread advertising blurbs, run them.

A relatively small group of 20,000 users commands the most attention, researchers at Yahoo Research have discovered. They are neither the most prolific nor the most widely followed users, but the website links they recommend are more often repeated and shared by others. When it comes to focusing public attention, content matters more than celebrity, the studies suggest.

Scanning 580 million tweets over eight months, Stanford University researchers discovered that Twitter topics seemed to rise and fall in six distinctive patterns that could help to predict their popularity. At Cornell University, network analysts discovered that bad news appeared to fade fastest, weighed down by words with negative connotations. Good news more often floated to the top, buoyed in part by words with positive associations.

As Twitter markets its commercial data more aggressively, some scientists say their requests for access to Twitter's full data stream are being turned down more often. "Twitter has definitely become more wary about sharing their data," said computer scientist Jon Kleinberg at Cornell University.

Twitter executives declined to be interviewed about the company's sale and sharing of data. A spokeswoman said in a written statement that the company actively supports academic research—up to a point. Twitter is donating all of its message data to the U.S. Library of Congress, but it may be years before it is available and then only with restrictions on its use imposed by the company.

Many computational sociologists believe that Twitter offers a unique prism for studying communications across the political spectrum—and a rich source of strategic intelligence for targeting voters.

Researchers say they can easily predict a Twitter user's political leanings by looking at whose messages they relay to friends and followers and matching them to gender, location and other interests. The hashtag codes used to denote discussion topics give network researchers a reliable way to chart fluid political alliances. The researchers can also sort Twitter messages automatically by tell-tale keywords.

Twitter also has become a powerful political organizing tool. University of Michigan researchers pored through Twitter posts from 700 campaigns in the 2010 election and found that conservative candidates were more likely than liberal candidates to use Twitter to broadcast campaign messages. When it comes to Twitter, conservative activists were more organized, more in touch with each other, and more likely to stay on message.

The new messaging medium has also spawned a new form of political deception, in which campaign operatives marshal an array of dummy Twitter accounts to spread rumors or misinformation. Like form letters, robo-calls and push polls, these Twitter tactics are inexpensive, since user accounts are free, and can potentially reach many more people than traditional campaign attack ads.

By analyzing millions of tweets during recent U.S. elections and policy battles, researchers at Indiana University and other non-partisan computer analysts have identified dozens of cases in which activists orchestrated networks of dummy accounts, apparently operated by computerized scripts, to sway swing voters, influence pending legislation or promote a partisan cause by turning the popular messaging service into a political echo chamber of automatically re-tweeted texts.

"This is manipulation of social media, not to sell a product or steal a password, but to manipulate public opinion," said computer scientist Filippo Menczer at Indiana University's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, which monitors Twitter traffic to document such practices. "It is so cheap and easy. The incentives for abuse are huge."

They detected efforts to spam the system for political ends from both sides of the partisan divide. On the right, for example, they uncovered a pair of accounts that, mimicking the chatter of two politically active women, sent out more than 20,000 messages promoting Republican congressional candidates. On the left, they found 15 orchestrated Twitter accounts acting in unison to promote liberal immigration reform. A third account transmitted more than 15,000 texts fanning anti-Muslim sentiments, including links to a video of a beheading.

These prolific tweeters were most likely not real people, the scientists determined, but automated shams, based on the pattern and volume of the messaging. This sort of deception appears to be evolving faster than Twitter Inc.'s security measures can control them. The company forbids spam and efforts to mislead, confuse or deceive people.

In anticipation of the upcoming U.S. presidential contest, researchers at Indiana University have been working on ways to detect and defuse Twitter misinformation campaigns automatically. But the technology of Twitter is moving so quickly that detection efforts can barely keep pace. "People can game these systems and, in gaming them, they help bias the results of any data company," said social media analyst Danah Boyd at Microsoft Research. "It's a real challenge."

Pitting machine intelligence against human gullibility, researchers at the Web Ecology Project in San Francisco are using Twitter as a proving ground for advanced pre-programmed personalities called "socialbots" that can engage in extended conversations via Twitter by imitating the behavior of real people sending and receiving messages.

Designed to attract a large Twitter following, these code creations are constructed as an experiment in human-machine interactions, but the software could readily be turned to other purposes. "For good or for ill, you can get people to talk about a topic and potentially affect real-world behavior," said independent software developer Tim Hwang, who has been overseeing the effort. "If the bots are well-designed, they are undetectable."

In surreptitious tests online earlier this year, these socialbots fooled 300 unwary Twitter users. After refining their software, the group this month launched dozens of even more sophisticated Twitterbots, hoping to build relationships with thousands of unsuspecting users.

One Twitterbot from an earlier experiment—its account now disabled —masqueraded as a sports enthusiast. "I love going on adventures whenever I can find the time to dust off my passport," its biographical profile read. Its profile picture showed an exultant mountain climber.

"Once we launched it, it was fully on its own," said software engineer Greg Marra at Google in Mountain View, Calif., who helped to develop the bot as a college project. By design, "it would pick up a tweet from another user and parrot it. Completely unsupervised, it could produce a stream of plagiarized tweets."

During its nine months as an active Twitter user, it sent hundreds of messages about sports, sex, diabetes and the importance of online marketing. It attracted 1,538 followers, who apparently never realized they were in a relationship with a robot.

Network sociologists are worried that these newest contrivances may offer others a powerful way to manipulate people through Twitter on an even larger scale. "Doing this on Twitter with a thousand accounts or a million accounts is the next step," said Indiana University computer scientist Jacob Ratkiewicz.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204138204576598942105167646.html#ixzz1jov9ZU9p

Be part of this year’s Mishmash Music/Video/Remix competition. Create your own short story, video art or music video using a mix of high res video, stills and music from Getty Images.

Be part of this year’s Mishmash Music/Video/Remix competition. Create your own short story, video art or music video using a mix of high res video, stills and music from Getty Images. There are great prizes up for grabs and it’s great exposure for your work.

gettyimages.com/mishmash

Mishmash 2012 Trailer from Getty Images on Vimeo.

#mishmashremix Check out this quirky Mishmash music video The Snip by top London A/V producers Hexstatic

 

creative commons a fight for creativity "We realize there’s an inherent conflict between innovative digital culture and archaic copyright laws"

 

http://creativecommons.org/culture

Our goal at Creative Commons is to increase cultural creativity in “the commons” — the body of work freely available to the public for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing. We realize there’s an inherent conflict between innovative digital culture and archaic copyright laws. Our licenses help bridge that conflict so that the Internet can reach its full potential.

We support the culture of the commons both on a user level and an institutional level.

 Nine Inch Nails Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, a collection of 36 new instrumental tracks that are available to the world under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. As Trent Reznor of NIN said on release, “This music arrived unexpectedly as the result of an experiment. The rules were as follows: 10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as… something…The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we’re able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed – from a 100% DRM-free, high-quality download.”
	Wikipedia Wikipedia migrated its licensing structure from the GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The world’s largest and most cited collaborative encyclopedia made this move via a community vote and for good reason. By changing to a CC BY-SA license, Wikipedia (and the entire collection of Wikimedia sites) allows content to legally flow in and out of the site with ease, enabling one of the great cultural resources of the digital revolution to legally interact with an endless array of similar cultural institutions.
	flickr flickr was one of the first major online communities to incorporate Creative Commons licensing options into its user interface, giving photographers around the world the easy ability to share photos on terms of their choosing. As the Flickr community grew, so did the number of CC-licensed images — currently there are well over 100 million on the site — establishing Flickr as the Web’s single largest source of CC-licensed content. Flickr’s services have grown to include a CC image portal and advanced CC search features, making the site one of world’s most useful resources for discovering creativity that is available for free and legal sharing, use, and remixing
	Google Google has utilized CC licenses in a variety of instances throughout their digital services. Either by enabling CC-search capabilities through their main search engine, image search engine, and book search engine, or by allowing users to CC license their own content in Picasa, Google Knol, and documentation at Google Code. YouTube, which is Google-owned, has also used CC-licenses in their audio-swap program, allowing users to swap “All Rights Reserved” music for similar-sounding CC-licensed tracks, as well as enabling CC-licensing for select institutions.
	Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was one of the first major cultural institutions to utilize CC licensing, releasing their classical music podcast The Concert under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license in September of 2006. By allowing the free sharing and re-distribution of their podcast, the Museum has been able to reach a wide ranging audience with The Concert seeing over one million downloads from over 116 different countries, creating a positive promotional tool for the museum and its classical music program.
	Amsterdam Historical Museum In March 2010, The Amsterdam Historical Museum (WAAG) released its complete collection online under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license, allowing the free redistribution and reuse of the collection for noncommercial purposes. This was the first time in the museum’s history that its collection has been available to the public. The collection contains over 70,000 objects dating back to the Middle Ages and is updated on a bi-weekly basis.
	National September 11th Memorial Museum In December of 2008, the National September 11th Memorial Museum launched its Artist Registry, allowing the public the ability to add their 9/11 inspired works to the museum’s collection. The museum allowed users to designate a CC license while uploading, encouraging community submissions in a progressive and socially responsible fashion.

User-Generated Culture

Whether you’re a photographer, writer, filmmaker, or DJ, our licenses can help make your work part of the commons. The Internet is a multiplier of cultural innovation. Creative Commons copyright licenses make it easier for individual creators of culture to express themselves and to identify the freedoms they want their creativity to carry on the Internet.

We support user-generated culture in three key ways.

1. We generate copyright licenses that anyone can adopt. The License Chooser tool helps you choose a copyright license that’s right for you based on how you want your work to be used and where. Anyone can obtain a license and embed it into their web site. It’s really that easy.
2. We partner with cultural sharing platforms like Wikipedia, Flickr, and blip.tv to provide their users with the option of licensing their works with Creative Commons copyright licenses. By embedding Creative Commons licenses right into these systems, we can help users create and share their work on a large scale.
3. We work with technology companies like Google and Yahoo! to make commons content easier to discover. Having tools is one thing, but they aren’t useful if people can’t find them.

Institutional Culture

The role of individuals in the cultural commons is growing, but a huge amount of our cultural heritage still resides within institutions. We work with museums, galleries, libraries, digital archives, and other cultural organizations to bring Creative Commons licenses into their infrastructures to manage their materials and make them more widely available.

Creative Commons is about building infrastructure for a new kind of culture  — one that is both a folk culture, and wildly more sophisticated than anything before it.

Have your own CC-licensed project to share with the world? Add it to our Case Study Wiki.