Enjoy this best-selling updated 8^th edition – packed with new material, keeping abreast with AI, AR, VR, MR, MA and other innovative approaches to marketing communications. All integrated with the world’s most popular SOSTAC® Planning methodology that delivers a reassuring sense of order in a chaotic digital world and also that delivers success from better, MarComms’ ‘information-based’ decisions.

In Part 2 – all ten marcomms tactical tools (incl ads, PR, sponsorship, Owned, Earned and Paid Media etc.)  has a sample SOSTAC® Plan at the end of chapter.

Ze Zook and I are so pleased with it.  So much new material including AI integrating with MarComms.  We’ve tried to keep the edutainment angle so readers actually enjoy discovering some cutting-edge examples, tips and tools throughout the book. Thanks to the team at @Kogan Page including: Alison, Donna, Bruna and  Jack, Jeylan, Susie and of course, Helen Kogan.

What New Marketing and What Classic Marketing is in the 8th ed.?

What’s new and what’s old in Marketing Communications 8th ed.?

20% author’s discount can be used legitimately by following these instructions.

1. Go to koganpage.com/MC8
2. Click ‘Add to Cart’
3. Click ‘Checkout’ on the top right corner of the screen.
4. Complete your Billing & Delivery Information
5. Click ‘Continue to Review & Pay’
6. Scroll down to ‘Review Items’
7. In this section, click the ‘Add an offer code’ button – bottom right
8. Enter your code AMK20 in the box provided
9. Scroll down to input your payment information
10. Click the ‘Buy Now’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Enjoy Your Book

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Provocative, Angry Twitter Rants = More Attention/Followers?

“If bad behavior or provocative and angry and ranting tweets lead to more attention,” says Deb Roy (2018), director of MIT’s Lab for Social Machines who continues, “well, you’ve just incentivized that behavior on the platform” emphasises Roy in an article for Time magazine by Katy Steinmetz (2018).

Buttons placed prominently – attracting viewers to like, retweet or reply – might be creating counter-productive incentives. Since one feels disappointed, or even bad, if the engagement numbers are low. But, when those numbers go up, users get ‘boosts of pleasure’.

Followers numbers fall = depression?

“This Is How Rats Work. Press A Lever, Get A Pellet”

Suggests Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology at New York University who says, “The human brain is structured the same way.” Van Bavel is referring to Professor Skinner’s experiments with rats in the 1940s when he explored how behaviour (& learning/remembering) can be conditioned with rewards/incentives (in the rat’s case, pellets of food).  Today, angry tweeters get rewarded with more followers.

Outrage outperforms moderate

Moral Outrage Tweets tend to Outperform Moderate Tweets
The problem is that ‘mindless outrage’ type of tweets tend to perform better (& therefore reward their authors) more than rational, considered tweets. One report suggests that provocative angry and ranting tweets outperform other tweets by approximately 20% (Van Bavel 2018).

Moral outrage is more likely to get more retweets

Van Bavel has found that tweets containing strong moral and emotional language, those with “moral outrage,” are about 20 percent more likely to get retweeted.

Outrage

Moral Outrage Generates Bigger Number of Followers = Trumpism?

‘Politicians on the ideological extremes — be they Democratic or Republican — tend to have bigger followings than their moderate counterparts.’ (Steinmetz 2018).  “Taking strong, polarizing stances, that’s what gets rewarded,” Van Bavel says, describing President Donald Trump as “off the charts” regarding polarizing messages.

Moral Outrage Generates Bigger Number of Followers?

So Who’s At Fault:  Twitter’s Algorithms Or Us Humans?

‘Algorithms that select popular content may be prioritizing and spreading the very types of posts that make people the most angry’, says Yale psychologist Molly Crockett (2018), who also suggests that therefore the social usefulness of outrage itself, may be depleted in the process.

So Who’s At Fault: Twitter Algorithms Or Us Humans?

A Culture of Mindless Outrage = Vulnerability to Manipulation

So it looks like provocative, angry and morally outraged tweets are contributing to a culture of mindless outrage. This, in turn, may make the heaving masses of people more susceptible to manipulation. Shades of 1930s Germany?

Kanye West (with his 28m followers) Agrees

Although the popular American singer, Kanye West, has 28m twitter followers, he agrees.  “[W]e should be able to participate in social media without having to show how many followers or likes we have,” he tweeted. “This has an intense negative impact on our self- worth.” This is the disappointed feeling we mentioned if ‘suffering’ low engagement levels. But when the engagement goes up users get ‘boosts of pleasure’.   

Kanye West objects to twitter accounts showing number of followers  (28.4m in his case)

This Threatens Twitter’s Own Survival

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, testified during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing about Twitter’s transparency and accountability (5 Sep 2018). He confirmed that he is willing to rethink not just twitter policies but the fundamental design of the twitter platform itself as part of twitter’s effort to beat: hate speech, fake news, trolls & disinformation – the curse of social media.

Twitter must now beat hate speech, fake news, trolls & disinformation – the curse of social media.

In The Long Run, Helping Customers Must Come First

Twitter CEO, Dorsey, confirmed that the need to improve the health of public conversation is a “long-term growth factor” for Twitter. And that this is more important than short-term twitter numbers going up or down, since “no one is going to use it (twitter) in the first place.”

In The Long Run, Helping Customers Must Come First

The Big Social Media Dream – still lives on…..

The big dream, MIT’s Deb Roy suggests, is “to build a leaderboard for having a positive effect on the public discourse.” A Utopian dream or can social media help to reduce the growing numbers suffering with anxiety and depression – partly induced, some say, by social media’s very visible approval ratings. Perhaps this negative can be turned into a positive?

What do you think?

Source: Steinmetz, K. (2018) ‘This Is How Rats Work.’ Why Twitter’s Emphasis on Follower Counts Could Be Backfiring, Time Magazine 19 Sep.

If you like this you might also like:

How Trump Won (Part 2) – using the Magic Marketing Formula (IRD) & including Pavlov’s ‘Classical Conditioning’ of dogs 

How Trump Won (Part 1) using the SOSTAC framework

The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture – Using Data & IRD

Take the 60 minute introductory SOSTAC® Planning course (8 x 7 minute video presentations)

Take the full 20 hour online full SOSTAC® course and become a SOSTAC® Certified Planner

The post How Rats Work = How Twitter Works? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Part 1 explored how psycholinguistics, data analytics can now derive people’s traits from their ‘linguistic  footprints’ – all based on just 200 of your tweets. Now I’ll look at the benefits of this analysis which I suspect, in years to come will be deemed an antiquated approach to marketing as analytics get more and more sophisticated and marketers scramble to maintain competitive advantage).

The Benefits

Based on psycholinguistics, data analytics can now derive people’s traits from their ‘linguistic footprints’ left from just 200 of your tweets. Part 1 explored how this worked. Part 2 now looks at what the possible benefits are to us marketers.

Save research dollars. Companies use this kind of research could save hundreds of millions of dollars. This analysis can also be used to evaluate the personality of a company representative in negotiations. Get deeper insights into groups, organisations and even whole cultures – “Now that we’ve hopefully covered (analysed) western culture (via tweets analysis), we need to move on to eastern culture as well.  “That’s another adventure” says Michelle Zhou of IBM research. Improve relevance and targeting and stop wasteful irrelevant messages that create information fatigue syndrome – many people feel they are drowning in a sea of ‘content marketing’ see my facebook post.

Understand yourself better –  these techniques might be able to help people understand the difference your ‘public self’ and your ‘private self’. By the way, the good news is that so far, IBM has gone through  500,000 different people and found that no two people are exactly alike.

Original article  Dean Takahashi

The post IBM Decipher Your Personality From 200 Of Your Tweets (part 2/2) appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Perhaps this is why one of the world’s biggest comms group , WPP,  recently signed a long term agreement with twitter. I did suggest on my facebook page that gaining access to valuable ‘customer insights’ was the real driver in this deal (28 Aug). The heaving mass of tweets (just like facebook posts) can be aggregated and fed into an algorithm to identify personality traits.

So analysts can take a ‘good  educated guess about your personality just from looking at 200 of your Twitter messages’. And now this can be ‘done in a disciplined and automated fashion using the science of data analytics’.

Old Segmentation v Psycholinguistics

Old segmentation based on demographics (age, sex, marital status, home, income) and behavioural analysis (what you read and/or what & how you buy) can now be enhanced (if not replaced) by psycholinguistics (analysis of anyone’s choice of words when using twitter).

Market researchers know that a buyer’s behaviour and decision-making process is heavily influenced by their intrinsic  traits e.g. people who are happy or depressed use different words.  

Based on psycholinguistics, data analytics can now derive people’s traits from their ‘linguistic  footprints’. So extracting correlations between a person’s word choice (& activity patterns) can reveal these intrinsic  traits. Something we couldn’t dream of just a few years ago.

Taking just 20 seconds to analyse 200 tweets (or  2,500 to 3,000 words) , IBM researchers claim to  create a personality evaluation that is accurate to within 10%.

In the meantime, I’m just a bit concerned that IBM might categorise me as a ‘face-enabled, automated bill board ad junky’ (if you are wondering what tweeted Freudian insights dig deep down into my dark secrets  then click the tweets on the blackboard to read into my personality or at least, into some of my interests.

Part 2/2 asks ‘why bother?’ and looks at the benefits of this kind of psycholinguistics analysis.

The post IBM Decipher Your Personality From 200 Of Your Tweets (part 1/2) appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.