social media

New chapter out on text-mining and digital research

06/19/2015 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

A chapter I co-authored on text-mining has (finally!) been published in the Sage publication, Innovations in Digital Research Methods.

Co-authored with Lawrence Ampofo, Ben O’Loughlin and Andrew Chadwick our chapter covers researching social media, discussing key techniques for textual analysis and exploring some of the opportunities, limitations and ethical considerations.

The full blurb from the introduction chapter is here:

Text Mining and Social Media: When Quantitative Meets Qualitative and Software Meets People
Text mining has developed dramatically in recent years in its power to analyse and extract information from very large bodies of unstructured text. Its applications are motivated by a growing awareness that researchers need more powerful tools in order to benefit from rapidly increasing amounts of textual data being generated through the proliferation and unprecedented levels of take up of Web 2.0 technologies. Chief among these are blogs and social media (‘micro-blogs’), the latter exemplified by the rise of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

In this chapter, Ampofo, Collister, O’Loughlin and Chadwick explore how text mining using natural language processing (NLP) techniques can provide qualitative social researchers with powerful analytical tools for extracting information from this unstructured data, including harvesting data and analysing it in real time. They survey the range of research tools for text mining, broadly defined, available both in the academic and commercial spheres. People’s use of social media is seen by many researchers as providing an ideal source of data through which to monitor rapidly changing situations, hence, it has come to particular prominence during civil unrest (e.g., the so-called ‘Arab Spring’) and natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Sandy). Beyond these inherently unpredictable phenomena, one of the most popular emerging applications of social media analysis lies in the tracking of public opinion through the application of NLP-based techniques such as sentiment analysis. These techniques have the capacity to generate results in real time, which offers intriguing possibilities for both commercial and academic research.

To illustrate the potential and challenges of using text mining techniques in social research, Ampofo, Collister, O’Loughlin and Chadwick present overviews of two projects. The first is a study of social media during the televised debates between political party leaders in the 2010 UK general election campaign. The second is also drawn from this election campaign and focuses on the reporting of accusations of bullying against then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the British media. The application of NLP-based text analysis tools to social data is still, in many respects, in its infancy. With this thought in mind, the authors conclude by outlining the ontological challenges (echoing the reservations that Elliot and Purdam set out in Chapter 3) and the technical challenges of mining text in social research settings. They note, in the case of social media, increasingly restrictive access policies, and they also consider the ethical implications of text mining used as a social research tool.

You can download the introduction over at the Sage website and download a full pre-publication version of the chapter from Royal Holloway’s New Political Communications Unit.

And of course, you can buy a copy of the whole book from Amazon.

PR can’t respond to ‘structural’ challenges of social media. Discuss.

09/05/2013 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

So. Here’s a thought. My old boss and friend, Robin Grant, told PRWeek last year that PR had missed the boat on digital. The reality, of course, is much more nuanced than that but there is a definite truth to what he says based on my own experiences and discussions with a range of people from within the PR world.

[Image via FRANk Media]

The full range of reasons behind Robin’s comment is something for a much longer post (or book, perhaps) but a series of recent conversations with smart people helped me clarify at least one aspect of PR’s problem.

For instance, in a discussion with an ex-digital director at a global PR agency we both agreed that some forms of social media, particularly community management, is becoming commodified and how PR agencies, again, risk missing the boat on digital, by placing their ‘social media offering’ firmly in this camp. Think of it as sort of replacing client press release churn with churning Facebook posts and tweets.

We agreed that the biggest barriers to PR getting social media right are structural. That’s as far as the conversation went.

Then today I was having a discussion with someone else about the increasing specialisation of social media and it dawned on me that one of the reasons why the PR profession has dragged its heals in terms of adopting and making the most of social media is its structure as a generalist industry where account teams are responsible for the full range of communication tasks (albeit with varying degrees of emphasis depending on seniority).

For example, as social media becomes specialised needing expert teams of researchers and planners; content creators, community managers and analysts, etc, PR agencies operating with employees that are trained as generalists to fulfil most, if not all of those roles, simply cannot keep up to date with the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed.

Advertising and digital agencies, on the other hand, are predominantly already structured into specialist teams. They only need to ensure that enough investment is made in ensuring their incumbent researchers, creatives, content producers, analysts, etc stay abreast of emerging knowledge and skills.

And then there’s the profit margins of PR. With their way bigger budgets, advertising and (some) digital agencies have more financial leeway to investment in training, resources and development.

So while, on paper, PR – with its theoretical foundation in understanding and building interpersonal relationships – should be on home territory when it comes to social media strategy in the main it is simply not structured in a way to make the most of this increasingly specialist landscape.

What is to be done?

Digital innovation: some reading

03/12/2013 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Serendipitously I stumbled across a couple of great articles about digital innovation in the advertising space recently which dovetail neatly with some of the thinking and writing I’ve been doing.

Following on from Adam’s comment about the diffusion and adoption of innovation within the PR sector (which warrants some analysis and a further blog post in its own right) it’s equally interesting to see how the same issues are being played out in the advertising space.

According to Digital Planning Director at BBDO/Proximity, Vincent Teo:

“This shift toward creative innovation and product development will be a continuous evolution in the agency space and one in which I believe will form the foundation of the digital agency of the future. There is a real synergy between product innovation and what agencies are currently doing and this looks like the next evolution in extending what agencies can offer to their clients.”

What this looks like in detail can found in Vincent’s great survey of the current ad/digital/innovation landscape, The Digital Agency of the Future. And following Vincent’s vision and line of questioning, a number of other posts and article’s further explore the same issues, including Rei Inamoto‘s Why Ad Agencies Should Act More Like Start-ups and .net magazine’s Inside the Labs of the World’s leading Digital Agencies.

Although there are some distinct differences between the ad and PR industries, both are rapidly converging around digital. Some level of comparative analysis will undoubtedly be useful to see where each industry is succeeding (and not succeeding) and looking for clearer paths to innovation, adoption and sharing/commercialisation. Hopefully more to come on this.

PR & paid media: a new reality?

03/06/2013 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

A number of smart PR agencies seem to be setting up new paid media divisions of late. First, Edelman announced its hire of Cassell Kroll as vice president, media strategy operating out of the firm’s digital arm. Shortly afterwards We Are Social revealed their new paid media offering, with ex-TBG Digital sales and client services director, David Gilbert, as Media Director. It is fascinating to see how the increasing convergence of owned, earned and paid media channels is rapidly driving organisational innovation in order to remain relevant and competitive. As We Are Social’s Global Managing Director, Robin Grant, puts it:

“Today’s social environment demands that media planning be integrated into brands’ social media strategies and for media buying to operate in real-time and in synergy with always-on social content creation and community management.”

Edelman also outlines its perspective on the contemporary converged media landscape that gives some rationale for their hire into a wider context and outlines nicely how the agency approaches digital in an increasingly integrated way:

The insights reflected in Edelman and We Are Social’s new business models and strategic offerings are part of wider trends I reiterate to my students when we discuss future directions for the PR industry. The reality is the PR industry they are learning about is arguably becoming less and less like industry they’re seeing represented in textbooks and also (perhaps worryingly) discussed by *some* senior industry speakers.

It’s also something that plays into my thoughts and speculation about the continued need to proactively innovate. The challenges and opportunities of social are ‘live’; that is to say they’re continual emerging meaning leading agencies or practitioners need to stay entrepreneurial in their approach to navigating this new media and communications landscape. This requires thinking freshly about what PR is now and where it’s going – or more specifically being taken by the flows of the social web.

Having worked with Edelman and We Are Social, this is a trait I can confidently say is present within the agencies’ senior leadership and embodied in employees. It must be there in others too undoubtedly, but how can we join up this thinking to ensure that ‘entrepreneurial’ agenda remains a priority – not just at the micro-level of individual agencies or organisations but more broadly at the macro, sector level.

I appreciate this is no small task requiring a focus on collaboration, rather than competition and again, potentially across sectors as well as organisations. Maybe it is already happening through industry events (but it’s not something I’ve come across recently). It’s an exciting time with a number of equally exciting opportunities for the PR industry; the question remains: how can we maximise these opportunities to ensure their strategic potential is realised? Hopefully more to come on this.