While writing my most recent paper, Psychographic Targeting and Messaging Customization, I tested an algorithm that identifies powerful drivers of purchase intent in the automobile category, psychological factors like narcissism, risk orientation, and social comparison bias via textual analysis.

My results show three things:

1. These simple factors may be more predictive of purchase intent than demographics or behavior, the two most commonly used targeting methods,
2. It is possible to identify and quantify psychological factors, like narcissism, by a textual analysis of a user’s Twitter feed, and
3. That, having identified which users are more receptive to certain messages, we can deliver segmented messaging to these users leveraging the psychological factors that drive purchase decisions.

The research, a combination of qualitative research and two quantitative surveys, identifies the step-by-step method by which an brand in any category can identify psychological motivators of purchase in their particular category and segment the audience via psychographics, rather than demographics or behavior.

Read the full paper here.

Terms: If you are not a representative of my insurance company, please click “Read More.” I am not responsible for what happens to you if you follow in my footsteps. I am not a role model.

Now then… let’s talk about biohacking.

As of tonight, I’m embarking on a quest to replace 80% of my meals with a macro- and micro-nutrient rich shake. Dubbed “Soylent” by its inventor, a 24-year old software engineer, the recipe has been slightly modified for my own personal needs.

The Recipe!

Olive Oil – 1/4 c.
Complete Protein – 4 scoops
Maltodextrin – 1 c.
ProFiber – 1 scoop
Monosodium Phosphate – 1/4 tsp.
Manganese – 2 droppers
Iron Supplement – 1 Capsule
Tums – 4 pills
Potassium Gluconate – 1 3/4 tbsp.
Table Salt – 1/2 tsp.
Multivitamin

Note: the products I picked were specifically selected to meet certain macro and micro-nutrient goals, and they cannot be substituted for other products without changing the entire stack.

Additional Nootropic Stack

I’ll be adding this to the nootropic stack I’ve regularly taken in the past but haven’t taken at all this year:
Vinpocetine – 2 capsules
Alpha GPC – 2 capsules
I’m removing Piracetam and Acetylcholine from the stack due to the taste.

GIFT BASKETS

Can you package one or more of your products together in a gift basket for Mom? If so, now’s the time to find some baskets and cellophane wrappers.

BAKED GOODS

Many independent bakeries fail to properly address the pertinent question on everyone’s mind: what should I get Mom? Consider a gift basket of pastries.

PAMPERING

Mom needs a spa day. If your spa isn’t offering a mother-daughter special around this time, you’re missing out on thousands in sales. Try Groupon!

CRAFTS

Craftistas and Etsy members get a big boom this time of year if they remember to include new products around Mother’s Day. Consider pink items with hearts!

E-CIGARETTES

At less than half the price of traditional cigarettes, an e-cigarette makes a great gift for a Mom who smokes. If you’re in the e-Cig business, it’s time for a media buy!

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sometimes the best gift to give Mom on Mother’s Day is the gift of family. Hosting family special discounts for a photography studio is a win-win for everyone.

LEARNING COURSES

Mom works hard for her kids, and now that the kids are grown up, she probably would love to learn a new skill or get a degree. For educators, this is a boon.

CHARITY

Making a charitable gift in Mom’s name is popular around this season. If you organize or manage a charity or non-profit, consider a timely banner advertisement.

PERSONALIZE IT

If your product or service can be personalized or engraved, now’s the time to start advertising it as a great gift for Mom. Can you etch?

What I can comment on though is Arrington’s reaction to the story. As far back as I can remember, Arrington has never had a reasoned, level-headed reaction to anything in his life. I’ve never looked at this man and said, “Wow, here’s a guy who’s going to change the future for the better.” In fact, about half of his Wikipedia entry is dedicated to controversies he’s been involved in.

In this case, Arrington responds with three short paragraphs saying, in essence: 1) I’m suing the girl, 2) I didn’t do it, and 3) The police are involved.

Actions usually speak louder than words, but not when the speaker has a soapbox the size of Arrington’s. In the scheme of things, this is a baseless (in Arrington’s eyes) accusation against a relatively unimportant Internet blowhard. It’s not the kind of story that people care about. Had Mr. Arrington simply hired his attorney, contacted the police, and avoided publicizing the matter himself, he might have escaped with less negative publicity.

Update: Arrington’s next response was much more appropriate. Why didn’t he lead with this?

For those who don’t know, there is currently a boycott of Oreo for their support of gay marriage rights. A few months ago, it was a boycott of Betty Crocker because they too support the civil right for gay couples to marry. Before that it was JC Penney & Ellen Degeneres, and even further back, it was McDonald’s.

If you still wish to frequent a business that supports discrimination against your fellow American citizens, perhaps you need to recognize those companies who do NOT: You will need to throw away your iPod, iPhone, and iPad since Apple supports gay marriages. Hopefully you have lots of clothes, because you’ll need to ditch your Levi’s and Nike’s too. Perhaps you bought them at JC Penney’s or Sears? Sucks… you’ll have to take them back. Actually, anything you wear from anywhere probably had a gay person involved.

Flying somewhere soon? Better not be on American, Delta, Southwest, or United – you’ll need a new ticket. Your choice of airline wasn’t mentioned above? Well then, just be sure your jet isn’t Boeing made (Boeing supports gay rights). Can’t sleep at a Marriott or Hilton (or any of their family brands) because, yep, they support civil rights.

That morning coffee from Starbucks will have to go as well, go ahead and replace it with a McCafe. Oh wait, McDonald’s supports gay rights too. Hmm, do you clean with Tide, Gain, or Bounty? Use Duracell batteries, shave with Gillette, or use Fixodent? Brush with Crest, use Pantene, Scope, Tampax, Venus, or Old Spice products? Those are all gone too, stupid Procter & Gamble supporting the gays.

Damn, you’re using Internet Explorer or Chrome to read this post? Download something else, Microsoft and Google show their gay pride as well as Hewlett-Packard and Xerox. Ah, but your drinks are safe. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Budweiser are on your side – if your side is on the right side of civil rights history, since all three also support gay rights.

Drive that big, manly, Ford F350? Ford and General Motors also support the rights of all gay Americans (Ford’s corporate network includes Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover & Aston-Martin vehicles). Macy’s, Nordstrom, the Gap, Levi Strauss, Liz Claiborne – yep have to boycott them all.

Remember Prop 8 in California? The United Farm Workers OPPOSED Prop 8. The California Nurses Association & the League of Women Voters OPPOSED Prop 8. The CA Teachers Assoc gave $1.25 million. PG&E gave $250k. Levi Strauss gave $250k & co chaired with PG&E a group designed to encourage businesses to OPPOSE Prop 8 – all to support the civil right for gay Americans to marry. So, if you agree that business owners have the right to discriminate against minorities, it appears some of you may simply need to just stay home and boycott everything.

(Attribution: Some of this, like the list of brands, and some of the text, was taken from a Facebook post, the original author of which is unknown. I’ve edited it as necessary.)

In the advertising world, it’s always more powerful to know something than it is to have an opinion. I am posting to confirm that I KNOW this guest author’s OPINION is wrong.

Upon expressing this critical opinion on Twitter, I was attacked by both the author and the editor. I have spent my career in Advertising, first as a copywriter and then as an analyst, trying to make people respect the value that creatives bring to the office. Too often, creatives are cast aside as too immature to deal with the more “grown up” parts of advertising, like planning, strategy, analytics, and objectives. The ability for the author and editor to deal with my initial criticism has done more to confirm the stereotype than to fight it.

The fact that this article contains so much clear misinformation has made me doubt the validity of the rest of the posts on AdLand, and it would behoove the editor to consider the content of her guest posts in the future.

To answer the initial question, “Is it that we just can’t admit that social media is not a money maker?”

I could draw your attention to dozens of things we KNOW:

1. Social media drives between 30% and 40% of the traffic to websites these days. For many brands, that means it drives 30% to 40% of the revenue. (We KNOW this)
2. Listening on social media allows brands to make better decisions about what customers want, leading to more efficient R&D and communication. (We KNOW this)
3. Facebook Ads drive sales at 8 times ad spend, Facebook Retargeting at 16 times ad spend. (We KNOW this)
4. Touching your customers again and again via social gives legs to your campaign and is much cheaper than buying another TV spot to keep frequency up. (We KNOW this)
5. Social media is literally the only way brands can make “friends,” and Word of Mouth drives 90% of all sales. (We KNOW this)

“Do we not want to face up to reality that social media is increasingly becoming a very expensive way of generating PR that cannot be measured?”

Social media is highly measurable. In fact, it’s the most measurable media available today. (We KNOW this)

“Coke is a business, not a personality contest. Regardless of what is being said here, the measure of any successful business is sales.”

You completely lose me with this paragraph. You’re in the advertising business, which means it’s your job to put faces and personalities to corporations. Coke is a faceless corporation that makes colored sugar water. But it’s also “happiness.” Social media works on the “happiness” side, not on the “colored sugar water” side. If you can’t connect those dots, quit.

The rest of the article leaves us with a reasonably good explanation of historical events, and I have no complaints about the factual basis of that section of the author’s “rant.” I’m just concerned that, moving from complaint to complaint, should he have decided to medicate again halfway through the piece, he might have come up with something substantially better.

Your presentation will have two parts to it, the presentation itself and the “Appendix,” which are slides that you show after your pitch has concluded while you are being asked questions. The presentation itself can not be longer than ten slides, but the appendix can be as many slides as you would like.

2. List of Must-Have Slides

• Pain point or market opportunity. How big is the market, how fast is it growing? -or- What is the problem you’re solving?
• Your solution. What is your product, its benefits, and where is the unique intellectual property?
• Selling and marketing strategy. Expected cost of customer acquisition.
• Your team, to answer the “why you” question.
• Status and timeline.
• Competition.

3. List of Should-Have Slides

• A Mission/Vision slide that clearly articulates the big vision, what problem you’re trying to solve, and where you see yourself in three or five years.
• Underlying magic/technology.
• Your business/revenue model.
• Financials and earnings projections.
• Final call to action slide to close the deal.

4. List of Could-Have Slides

• A cover slide to introduce your venture and include your contact information and a tagline. Much more important if you’re sending your deck via email rather than presenting it directly.
• A description of your existing customers or target customers, particularly, who will be writing you the check?
• Your value proposition. What is the value to the customer?
• Funding plans. How much have you raised, what are you trying to raise, and how will it be spent?
• Partnerships, current and future, and how dependent you are on them.

First question to answer is what things are NOT Analytics:

• Brand X share of voice is 45%
• Negative sentiment increased from March to April because of voluntary recall
• CTR from Twitter is .5%
• “Cool” is the most commonly used word in conversations online about your brand

This kind of data in isolation rarely leads to any kind of change. But it is possible to transform this data into something that will cause a positive change in a communications and marketing strategy.

Here’s the right way to do it:

• Know thy marketplace.
• Start with a specific hypothesis / question. Don’t collect data for data’s sake.
• Understand how social touches people.
• Avoid data silos.
• Connect to business and organizational objectives whenever possible. Start to connect to awareness or sales objectives.
• Target insights to your audience. The insights you provide to a brand manager will be different than you provide to a community manager or a C-level executive.

-Unknown

If we talked to people like advertisements talk to them, they’d punch us in the face.

Fans come in all forms and shapes and sizes. They are a third party that lend credibility to the conversations that are out there. We have a lot of end goals in communications: at the end of the day, I wanna sell more stuff for my clients. But as a word of mouth professional, I want to find ambassadors for my brand. I want people who go out and shout from the mountaintops how much they love my brand and my company.

WCG has people who actually call them to say, “I want to be a brand ambassador for Red Bull.” We realize soon they’re just a model that gets paid to stand by the booth. But that’s not a brand ambassador. We want raving fans. People who love us just a little too much. Brands often say “We want to embrace the crazy fans, but they’re a little too crazy.” But we say – that’s okay, that’s the kind of person we want. No matter what you do, they’re going to be loyal to you.

Advertising is never going to go away, but it’s for awareness. Where the fans come in is credibility. People don’t trust brands anymore. They don’t trust them to do the right thing, they don’t trust them when they talk about themselves, but when that third party comes in that they know, they trust them. Even ratings and reviews are questionable online. If you’re going to buy a car, you’re gonna do research online first, but if your neighbor has the car, you’re gonna go ask him “what do you think of that car?”

90% of Word of Mouth still happens offline.

There are a lot of brands that are just collecting fans like poker chips. It’s great that we can collect likes, but what are we going to DO with them?

Here are some things to keep in mind when finding those fans:

Give them a reason to be a fan.

It’s easy to be a fan of something like Red Bull, because they’re into extreme sports and they make cool videos and they’re a great media company. But we go to our clients and we say, we need to figure out what our fans really get passionate about. If we work for pharmaceutical companies, we can’t say “everybody get excited about Phizer!” So we have to figure out what those people are passionate about, and then we become the conduit. If we can connect someone to something they care about, then we’re naturally a part of that conversation.

Fiskars can connect people to their passion, scrapbooking.

Make fans feel special

There’s too much crap out there. People want to know where the secret clubhouse is. If you do, you’re gonna feel special, and you’re going to go tell people that you know where the secret clubhouse is. Fans and ambassadors need a rallying cry. They need a way to identify each other. Like LiveStrong’s yellow bands. Everybody wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

We need to think about customer loyalty differently.

Just because someone buys your product repeatedly doesn’t mean they’re loyalty. When we think about loyalty, we need people to feel like they’re partial owners in your company. I want evangelists that feel like if I win, they win.

-Anthony Bourdain

I’m pretty sure I spotted Edward Boches, the CIO of Mullen, about twenty people behind me in line at the Art Copy Code talk presented by Google, featuring Ben Malbon, managing director of the Google Creative Lab, and Aman Govil, Google’s Advertising Arts lead. I showed up 45 minutes early knowing this event was going to be in high demand – not only was it held in one of the smallest ballrooms at SXSW, Google relentlessly papered all of the columns (and trees) surrounding the event with posters promoting the talk every day since Friday. This was an event missed by many, but not for lack of trying. Hundreds were turned away at the door. I was barely let in and am seated at the very back of the room on the floor, kindergarten style. Mr. Boches must have called a friend inside, because his section of the line was officially turned away, but he managed to find a seat at a table somewhere in the middle of the floor.

It’s a pretty exciting time to be doing what we’re doing. The work we’re making isn’t like the ads we’re used to. It’s connecting the real world to the web. Telling real, personal stories with data. Google’s intro to the talk invites us to wonder what we can make next.

How do we react to changes that are happening in the advertising industry? There are two possible ways that we can react: we can say “oh, shit, what are we going to do,” or we can say “this is really cool, how can we use this?” Google thinks the secret to falling into the latter group is to have a strong vision of the future and how we’re going to make order out of the chaos. While they don’t have any solutions about how to do this, they do have some first thoughts, and that’s what they’re presenting today.

See more at artcopycode.com.

Here are some of my thoughts on Musk’s very, very disruptive life.

We’ve done articles on Facebook Graph Search before, but since it hasn’t been made available to the public yet, there’s a lot of speculation on what its benefit to marketers will be once it’s fully rolled out.

We sat down with a number of industry professionals to discuss topics surrounding Facebook Graph Search. Here’s the recap of a panel entitled “Implications of Facebook Graph Search for Marketers,” moderated by Max Kalehoff, VP Product Marketing, Syncapse, featuring the following speakers:

Darren McColl, Vice President of Global Brand Strategy, SapientNitro
Paul Dejarnatt, VP/Search Director, StarCom
Peter Fasano, Senior VP, Social @ Ogilvy
Chase McMichael, President, CEO, Infinigraph
Natanya Anderson, Director of Social Media, Whole Foods Market

[Natanya]
I think there are a lot of opportunities with Graph Search to create local opportunities, especially for lifestyle brands. We’ll be able to explore and broaden relationships and create a more meaningful conversation. Awesome thoughts, but totally speculative and very theoretical.

The fact that it’s still out there in beta makes the reality non-existant, as we have nothing to play with yet.

[Chase]
There is an opportunity though. If you have local retail locations and start putting its information in and making it relevant, that can be highly valuable for retail locations. Being first to the market is crucial here. Some of the first businesses on Google Local were hugely successful and reaped millions of dollars.

Brands that can regionalize themselves as quickly as possible, localize that content as quickly as possible, will trump the brands that spent millions of dollars building their national presence.

A paradigm shift is going to happen. I’m accessing content on my Facebook feed more often than on a search engine. I don’t think they should be calling it Facebook Search, because it’s more likely to be a discovery engine, not a search engine.

[Paul]
If you’re able to sort your news feed as these different channels Facebook is coming out with, you may not need a graph search. There’s a question of whether this is going to undermine Graph Search or enhance it.

[Peter]
As a national brand that has local locations, it’s difficult to provide contextual editorial out there, but is editorial really the place where the interest in consumption occurs? Knowing your content types, what creates the best engagement, is even more important. Graph Search answers some questions like “how do you query images in a more interesting way?”

[Darren]
My question is whether or not it will become pervasive. I’m not sure how valuable it will be. Just because I love whole foods, I don’t need to know that 15 of my friends love whole foods. The challenge for me is understanding how it will interact with the ecology of our life.

[Chase]
If the Graph Search transforms the social network in a way that makes me more relevant and helps me engage with people around me faster, that will be adopted. If it requires me to take extra steps to engage, it will fail.

[Natanya]
Our first users will likely be early adopters, more tech savvy, and we know how these people behave in our stores. Traditionally, they don’t engage with us in a strong community way. We are going to be looking at how we can answer their questions like, “What should I have for dinner tonight?” We’re going to use it to present information to customers regarding what’s on their mind. I think brands will have to take advantage of it like this proactively until it gets more traction. I also want to see what people are searching for, and I hope Facebook will let us see top searches. And will we graph search optimize like we do SEO?

- Governor Romney made a remark about PBS funding & big bird
- Within minutes, PBS was contacted directly by Twitter, who they had already been working with on other projects
- While all of this was going on, PBS was preparing to launch valuepbs.org. It was not ready, but they decided this evening that they wanted to have it ready the next morning so that they could send out a Tweet that would get people talking about the value of PBS.
- Within seconds, their Facebook numbers jumped dramatically. They got several thousand new followers in about an hour. This was a signal to them that the temperature in the room was changing: that people were serious about supporting PBS. They wanted to show PBS their support after what was said in the debate. This showed that PBS they had a great opportunity to get in the conversation.
- Tracking went into higher gear, ascertaining what conversations were happening about Big Bird on Twitter
- Plans for the next day were put into place within an hour of the debate’s conclusion
- PBS was a trending topic for more than 12 hours

Lessons learned:

- Crafting the right tweet, and putting it in front of the right people, took time.
- There is a time to wait for the right response. In hindsight, the tweet PBS posted had the right tenor, and drove sustainable traffic to the valuepbs.org website

This article is going to focus on some of the newest opportunities in online social media and how buyers are integrating them. One of the themes we’ll hear today is the change from raw metrics in social media to deeper, real relationships. It’s a change that means social media is growing up. How do we use meaningful metrics and move beyond some of the simple metrics we’ve used before?

[Dachis]
“I started a company called Razorfish in my East Village apartent with an old nursery school buddy of mine. For better or for worse, we’re known partially for having created one of the first banner ads ever. We also created the first Web animation. These things establisehd Razorfish as a company that really established Razorfish as a company that was the leader in digital marketing solutions as you know it today. That was eighteen years ago. It’s hard to believe the online marketing world is that old, but I’ve been doing this since literally the very beginning. I’m very proud to be here and very excited about the dialogue that we can have about where things stand today and where they’re going.

After eighteen years I still remain immensely passionate about what the digital revolution meant to me then and what it now means. The idea that somehow digital was going to transform how businesses get built, how brands get built, how media was going to happen, how people interacted with each other, was all things you’d envision in the early 90s, then they started to become a reality. The Internet was a really big deal, and we all said “the revolution is here!” Here we are nearly 20 years later and we’re actually DOING this. You’re part of what I call the largest shift in the communication landscape in the history of mandkind. As we start to evolve this Internet thing, online marketing became a thing, online publishing became a thing, branding became a thing, and here we are today.

If you look at the evolution of digital, you’ve seen all forms of digital take effect inside businesses. You’ve seen the marketing landscape shift dramatically toward search as AdWords began to become a thing. You’ve seen SEO and Search drive marketing spend. That’s a $600 billion activity. About $60 or $70 billion each year is spent on digital marketing. That’s mostly in paid search. That’s primarily a middle and bottom of the funnel activity. Social is about a $6 billion marketplace.

In the early days, social media was baffling to me. I couldn’t figure out why all this sharing and connection would matter to brands. Then I realized that if you could capture this and understand the data that underlies it, you could make grand marketing decisions based on all the data. If you knew that 600,000 people liked sandwiches with mayo at a certain time in a certain city, you’d know where to park the food truck and how much bread and mayo to order. If you can capture the data associated with that engagement, you can begin to understand people better.

This is based on a concept I call the democratization of the tools of self expression. For the last several hundred years, all the power of production and distribution of ideas has been held in the hands of a few. When you think about religion, the Bible was widely dissimenated only when the printing press was invented. In the last 100 years, the major media companies have been in charge of the production and distribution of ideas. But in the last 7 years, the democratization of the tools of self-expression have enabled each and every one of us to express our ideas in ways we’ve never seen before and share them worldwide, for free, in HD.

The miniturization of computing power, ubiquitous bandwidth, battery lives, miniature cameras. This consumerization of technology has allowed people to take pictures of their kitty cats, share their gluten free recipes, create manifestos to overthrow governments, and express their feelings about a wide variety of things. And they’re doing it all over the world, for free, in HD.

That’s a huge shift in the way people are sharing ideas. If you think about how brands get built, we’ve moved from mass communications where brands are communicating at you, to an era of mass communicators. This represents the largest and most powerful shift in the communication landscape in the history of mankind.

This means that we’re going to reboot the way brands get built. Brands have been built off the back of renting audiences from media companies and talking at them, but now, things have shifted. You don’t watch TV the way that you used to. You can no longer put billboards somewhere and expect people to be influenced by your marketing messages. They don’t trust them anymore. They trust the authenticity of the conversations they have with each other, because you’re now able to share your experiences with others.

This asynchronization of the way messages are dissimenated represents a massive shift in the way brands get built. Consumers do not believe cookies are made by elves in hollow trees in forests. This type of marketing isn’t going to be effective for brands going forward. But with digital and social, we have the potential to engage audience rather than advertise at them. We’re shifting from advertisement to engagement.

How do we get people to engage? We can’t do it with banner ads. This represents the old communications architecture. Brand marketers really need to start thinking about authentic engagement. And it’s not a $6b opportunity, it’s a $600b opportunity.

People are more apt to trust the recommendations they get from strangers than they do from brand marketing activities. You’re more willing to take a hotel recommendation from a complete stranger than you are from the advertising copy that hotel puts out.

Social marketing is ideal for engagement at scale, but it’s hard to do. The audience is on a massive scale: 1.2 billion users on facebook. 350 million tweets a day. All of this containing brand-relevant engagement with your brand from millions of people. This creates an enormous opportunity from brands. If you can harness the power of big data, you can start to hone in on some of the important opportunities for creating brand love.

What’s important to engage at scale is to mobilize your constituants. Brands have lots of constituants: your partners and vendors, your shareholders, your employees, then the customers themselves. If brands can figure out ways to mobilize and activate their entire set of constituants, you have a huge, powerful engagement audience creator for you. But community managers can’t do it. It’s nearly impossible for a staff of community managers or even an army of community managers to have authentic, trusted engagements with those millions of users. If you think in the paradigm of engagement vs. advertising, putting up a billboard on facebook and expecting people to engage with it in your feed is kind of foolish. You need these authentic people to engage on your behalf. All coordinated, on brand message, an understanding their own goals and their contribution to your company.

We need to stop thinking about mass communications and start thinking about how to engage the mass of communicators. We need to turn partners, employees, and customers into our advocates. This means rethinking owned, earned, and paid media. We own the brand channel, we generate the earned media through our engaged customer base, and we use paid media to reinforce and amplify that earned and owned activity. If you strategically deploy your paid advertising dollars after engaging and mobilizing your audience, they will go a lot further.”

Question of the day: how is data regulated in the health insurance industry, and how does this protect you and your private information? How can health care and big data come together to benefit personal health?

According to the 2013 Pew Health Insurance survey, 75% of Internet users under aged 65 go online to research health care. 80% of patient information is unstructured, and in turn, unmineable. It’s completely wasted by the health care industry. But as data becomes more relevant to how we care for patients, and the overall patient experience, we have to get our house in order and modernize the health data industry overall. We’re dealing with very old systems designed primarily to make money for doctors and hospitals and to allow insurance companies to pay doctors properly. They weren’t designed to be mined and understood to improve the quality of care of patients.

In today’s discussion, we’re going to cover four primary areas:
- About Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan
- Regulation in Healthcare
- The Changing Marketplace
- Deploying Big Data Successfully

About Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan

Blue Cross Blue Shield is a guaranteed issue insurer (the only one in Michigan), which means that no customer is turned down for insurance. With $20.4 billion in revenue, BCBSM would be ranked 138 on Fortune 500. BCBSM pays $50 million per day in health care claims and $18.2 billion per year. This money helps Michigan’s entire health care industry serve patients, operate hospitals, doctor’s offices, provide jobs for people. Health care is the number two employer in the state of Michigan.

Michigan has a little more than 10 million people in it, and BCBSM covers a little over four million over them. Competitors cover two million, and the government covers another two million.

There really is no industry in America that is more personal than health care. Your life (quite literally) can be in their hands. And your most private information surely is. Health care insurers take your information very seriously, and there is no higher priority for hospitals and physicians than protecting your privacy. In the health insurance industry, they have access to thousands of codes from doctors and hospitals to record treatments and procedures to allow them to be paid for. And health insurance companies have access to this. It’s highly personal and very sensitive, so privacy and security is fundamental to how health care organizations conduct their business.

Regulation in the Health Care Industry

Regulation is very challenging at time for us, very burdensome, and very costly. But, we recognize the importance of it. It ensures the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of your most personal data. It ensures that companies and individuals are held accountable for this. Two primary Federal laws regulate information available: HIPPA and HITECH. HIPPA requires companies to have policies regarding administrative, physical, and technical protection of data. But privacy breaches are very prevalent. Healthcare Medical Providers lead the industries in reported privacy breaches with 3-5 times the average number of breaches. This is likely because the industry is very good at self-policing and ensuring their own compliance with HIPPA and HITECH.

HITECH is the first step in the development of a national technology health infrastructure. Part of the challenge of the health care industry is making a system that can connect all of the entities involved in health care with each other to provide shared information in real time to help improve treatment. Health insurance companies who violate HITECH could pay up to $1.5 million in fines and penalties for violating policies.

This puts in a number of challenges for social media. Doctors are using Twitter more as people, but they’re running into options as physicians because of all the regulatory requirements to maintain patient confidentiality. Medical professionals have sheid away from social media simply because these platforms do not enable us to have the type of security measures built in that we have through old technology where we can protect people’s privacy.

The Changing Healthcare Market

Healthcare reform is changing the game for health insurers. The Affordable Care Act is literally reshaping the industry. After five decades of attempted reform, we’ve finally arrived at change, and now it’s time to figure out where to go from here. The market impact of the ACA is important to understand. It enables people up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ insurance plan. It creates online marketplaces where consumers will shop for health insurance plans. It creates tax incentives and disincentives for businesses to offer health insurance as a benefit. It provides financial support for many consumers to buy insurance on the exchanges. These changes are shifting the industry very quickly into a B2C marketplace. BCBSM projects the marketplace for individuals to purchase their own healthcare will triple in the next four years, from 10% in 2013 to 30% in 2017. This means that, from the consumers perspective, consumers are going to be exposed to brand new information that they haven’t been exposed to before, and how they digest that information and make decisions for them come October when the new marketplace comes into being, this is a major focus of our organization this year. We want to help consumers understand what health insurance is all about.

How We Deploy Big Data in Healthcare

The companies who can win the data game will win this marketplace. Big data is a competitive advantage. Social media is a communications imperative in a B2C marketplace. A recent study by JD Power & Associates found that companies who like a brand on social media are about 50% more likely to purchase a product from the company, and in an industry that is rushing to B2C, getting social media right is a business imperative.

Social media is so new, not even 10 years old, that our views and expertise is still developing and growing. Social media is not about brands. It’s not about marketing, selling, PR, content, or about telling anyone anything. People expcet brands that deploy social channels to listen and respond. I’m astonished by the number of brands that launch social media and use them explicitely as marketing brochures, just pushing content out, not engaging with customers. If you’ve launched a Twitter handle for your brand, the worst thing that you can do (other than use profanity in your tweets), is to not respond to someone who talks to you. If you’re not ready to engage customers on social media, don’t have a social media account.

Customer Service on Social Channels

Customer service issues on social channels are typically a customer’s last resort. The BCBSM team replies on the social channel, letting the person know they’ve been heard. The team takes details offline, either over phone or email to ensure HIPAA compliance.

Social and digital media can connect people to brands. This is different than connecting brands to people.

BCBSM’s Approach to Social:
- Listen
- Identify Our Content Bubbles (Where can we produce content for customers that they can relate to?)
- Publish Excellent Content
- Build Our Communities
- Engage Our Employees (half our visitors to our blogs are employees of BCBSM interested in seeing how we communicate externally)
- Measure and Refine

Great content lives in the overlap of the company’s passions and people’s passions. If you can identify content that lives successfully in that space, your social media activity will be far more successful.

How we measure social:
- Community Growth
- Content Generation
- Community Participation
- Site Traffic
- Social Mentions
- Search Volume
- Referral Traffic to Blogs
- Referral Traffic to BCBSM Website
- Share of Voice
- Share of Search

Social media opens all the windows of the Ivory Tower, allowing us to see our customers and allowing them to see us as people. Nobody loves their health insurance company, but social media allows customers to look in the window and see that we are people who care about our customers.

You can stream the event again here.

To answer this question, we sat down with Ashley Bryant, the former State Digital Director for Obama for America, Ohio, Grant Reeher, a professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and Paul Morarescu, an associate professor at the iSchool at Syracuse University. Watch the video stream of the event here.

[Ashley Bryant - State Digital Director, Obama for America, Ohio]
What you’re seeing is that companies, brands, and politicians are recognizing where we are when it comes to needing to understand and integrate data, and being focused on the campaign, monitoring, and anylizing, making changes in real time, based on data, to be more informed about our consumer or our voter, shows that we’ve come a long way (even though we have a long way to go). We have a seat at the table, whether that’s political plans or marketing plans, from start to finish.

[Grant Reeher - Professor of Political Science, Maxwell School @ Syracuse University]
There are a lot of concerns that get raised about the use of information available from the Internet. I don’t worry so much about the problem called the “digital divide,” and I don’t worry too much about the problem of declining social capital. The one I do wrestle with is this: when you look at the kind of things the Obama campaign was able to do, and certainly, they weren’t the only ones who have done this or the only ones who were doing it at the time, but arguable, they were the ones that did it the best, there’s a parodox that strikes me. The Internet seems to be integral to a certain kind of organizing and political participation, something we’d like to see. It’s more horizontal, there’s a joining of this data collection to volunteer behavior. It seems to come from the bottom up and has a lot of peer to peer aspects to it. As I wonder about it, I worry about it. How manufactured is it? On one hand, we’ve got campaigns being able to use the information and connect that to the social networking aspects of the Internet and generate some real political attention and interest that arguably wasn’t there before. That’s all good. In addition to that, the activities that these folks are engaging in are real: real people, knocking on real doors, talking to each other, phoning each other, emailing each others. All these conversations are real, but I’m still haunted by the idea that there might be something manipulative about it. They’re doing it because you’ve got a bunch of smart people behind the Oz curtain pulling the levers in certain ways making this happen.

[Paul Morarescu - Associate Professor, iSchool, Newhouse School @ Syracuse University]
At the iSchool, we have a whole curriculum which is kind of big data and data science. So that is one of the impacts that big data has today and has had for some years: it’s changing the curriculum in US universities. Going back to the election, I think that one of the catchphrases I like is that it was a “Moneyball” election in that big data changed the whole picture. Data replaced full teams of people that were using their gut instinct and experience. All that was replaced with using data and making mathematical decisions. We are going in the same direction in politics. What the Obama campaign did this election was great, and in 2016 and 2020 we will see more big data and more impact of big data. I am midway between enthusiastic about big data, but I am trying to be objective about big data and think about the implications of using big data in elections.

Big data is going to impact most aspects of our lives: not just politics and university curriculums. Every sector of industry will change, like high frequency trading in the financial industry. According to IBM, 1/3 of business executives today make decisions on data that is either missing or data that can’t be trusted. You can achieve amazing things using data.

[Moderator]
There are a number of activities that your people engaged in in Ohio that got people to voluntarily come to you as data sets themselves, and that allowed you to do a number of different things. Can you describe an activity or transaction that took place there where people come to you with information?

[Ashley Bryant]
Our events, which is more of an offline example, I decided that people are voluntarily coming to see the president and vice president. They have to get a ticket. We were making sure the forms they were filling out to get a ticket included information that we deemed important to understand who the people were that were coming to see the president: were they stark supporters, what groups are they identifying with? We collected names, email addresses, student status, veteran status, gender. It has a lower barrier to entry, because people aren’t really worried about giving their information when they’re going to see the president. Another example is our website. When we launched catholicsforobama, people want to be updated, stay in the know of when the catholicsforobama meetings were happening. People were voluntarily giving us information here, letting us know what concerns they had and what matters to them. People were voluntarily coming into the fold and giving their information which we can use to understand who the folks are that are coming to us.

[Moderator]
This brings me back to the notion that the data is causing people to be manipulating. I can hear those people who are concerned about issues of privacy waving the flag and saying “This is an issue of privacy.” Do these people know what they’re giving away? Is that something we should be concerned about as we go forward?

[Grant Reeher]
It’s the multiplicity of ways of gathering this information and then joining it all up. We get a picture of the folks you’re trying to reach and how we’re reaching them, but it’s also buying the cookies, doing the stuff that Amazon does. I’ve gotten great recommendations that come to me back through the fact that someone bought the ability to look at my activity. I’m torn by it, but I think the concern is when you take all these different streams of information and microtargeting, then getting me to do something. It’s a good thing that people are going door to door, but I wonder what’s driving it?

[Paul Morarescu]
There are concerns related to privacy. One bit of information I found in the media is that the Obama campaign can guess the identity of all 70 million voters who voted for Obama in 2008. Another thing that I read is that Obama had contracts with companies to provide information about the television programs that “persuadable voters” were watching. What that information was used for was a program called “Optimzier,” dividing the day into 15-minute segments. They then computing in what segment and what channel they would get the most persuadable voters for the dollar so they’d know where to place the ads. They could justify advertising in unconventional programming like “Sons of Anarchy.” The Obama campaign went into a lot of detail and combined a lot of data from fundraisers, previous elections, consumer information like credit, etc, and I don’t think most people know how much data went into this. What’s going to happen with that future: is it going to be used in future elections, sold to other parties, etc?

[Moderator]
Think about the demographic of people who are watching Big 10 Football in September. That’s the demographic that the Obama campaign was reaching with their targeted ads. Do you think this kind of targeting saved the campaign some money?

[Ashley Bryant]
Targeting done right allows you to apply your resources more efficiently. For myself, I am the digital director for Barack Obama in Ohio, and I recieved four different Romney mailings. You have to stop and pause and ask “At what point am I not persuadable to vote for Romney?” I think that’s a huge difference – while they may have had a lot of money, it wasn’t applied correctly, and it was a lot of wasted money. We applied the time to figure out these data sets and figure out the targeting and determine if it was the Big 10 network or advertising on the right show. This let us free up resources to have more bodies on the ground knocking on doors. Targeting is very important in being able to understand the information you’re collecting when it comes to a resource/productivity standpoint.

[Grant Reeher]
Earlier you said “Content is king.” You’ve got to have something to say. The ultimate content is the candidate. You’ve got to have a candidate you can get behind. Do you think there’s not a temptation that you can figure this stuff out – that you can say, at 11pm, these potential voters are doing this on this channel, and this is where we have to place this kind of ad, that the attraction of that has to become more of the content than the actual substance of the message?

[Ashley Bryant]
I would disagree in a sense. The message was there, it was consistent. Whether we’re tailoring the message or not doesn’t necessarily change the president, it doesn’t change who he is or his stance, it’s just that we’re going to put them in front of someone at the right time. It allows us to increase our visibility with the right people at the right time.

[Moderator]
This could give rise to a candidate that is so perfectly targeted that he’s different to everyone who views.

[Paul Morarescu]
A/B testing allowed people to select the attributes of the people who were persuadable and understand how to persuade everybody by tweaking the message using data. One day we may be able to select the best candidate using big data, which goes against the common wisdom and experience of the campaign managers who have been doing this for 50 years. Maybe they won’t just be able to match the message to the voter but also the message to the candidate, which gives us a team of candidates that have been mathematically selected.

[Moderator]
Talk to me about the parallels between working at Jim Beam and working at the Obama campaign.

[Ashley Bryant]
Coming from marketing and moving into Obama, I thought it would be a huge transition in a strategy standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint, I was able to look at it almost as if it was a flash sale. We have a brand, the president, and what is the killer marketing strategy that I’m going to run for a year to get everyone in the door on this one day? It’s funny, because you only get to the risky, the scary, the creepy in the political standpoint. Brands have been doing this for years. Nielsen studies tell brands and retailers about your behavior. Targeting within the TV form has been around forever. It’s seemingly much more intrusive because politics seem so personal. It’s a little more watched, and you notice it more, when they’re learning their behaviors. But it’s very similar from a marketing standpoint for a political candidate. It’s bad that I’m saying we market the president the same as I market shampoo, but the fundamentals of understanding how and when to message and what resonates with particular consumers is very consistant across the board.

[Grant Reeher]
That reminds me of a quote from John F Kennedy’s father when he was running for president, “We will sell Jack like soap flakes.” There is one distinction to make. Politics is different in a very important way. I think politics is more important. What makes it more important is that the question of whether the A’s or the Oriole’s win the World Series is not a moral question. Politics is about allocating values, not consumption choices.

[Moderator]
Question from the audience: For students who are interested in digital strategy and data analytics, what skills are most important to know?

[Paul Morarescu]
There are two jobs out there called data scientists and data engineers. You need to know statistics, which includes data mining and looking for patterns in data, computer science, and how to program computers, especially in the R programming language, you need to be a good communicator as compared to the average computer scientist, because you have to communicate your results to a large audience. A data scientist isn’t just a guy who sits in his cubicle, he’ll be communicating directly with the top management of the company, politicians, voters, etc. Maybe some social psychology, behavioral economics, etc, so you know what kind of data to put in your big data models to get the best results.

[Dean Lorraine Branham]
What courses might be helpful for those who are in the communications professors who may want to move along the direction of getting more out of big data and data science?

[Ashley Bryant]
My background is communications, I think that Paul is right about being able to communicate well. Really immerse yourself from an overall business standpoint. For measurement, you don’t have to get into the intricacies of being a data scientist, but you need to have the base understanding of being able to measure and analyze whether your marketing campaigns or strategies were successes or failures. A lot of the data science is on-the-job learning. If you have the opportunities, make sure you’re giving yourself a broader sense of data science.

[Moderator]
Who owns the Obama campaign now? All that data? Could Hillary Cilnton buy it? Could someone else buy it? Could it be repurposed for another campaign? What happens if it gets hacked?

Obama for America owns the data, and they can’t sell it. They might hand it down to the next candidate, but the presenter couldn’t speak to that level of campaign knowledge. If it was to be hacked, it would depend on who hacked it and for what purpose. Legitimate companies wouldn’t be able to legally use it, as far as I’m aware.

[Question]
What were the metrics the Obama campaign looked at? What counted as a conversion?

[Ashley Bryant]
Persuasion is a phase that really never ends, but targeting is what helps us phase out our persuasion to allocate resources to the next phase. Votor registration is the next phase. It’s a target number we’re working toward. There are a few numbers we can look at in 2008 and key factors that let us know we need to hit this number directly or double it. For voter registration we knew the target we were looking for. For turnout, where we can break it down by county, to know we need this many people for this county. Those are the conversions that we can judge. Votor registration is the first time we go “where are we” and analyze our results. From there, we turn our registrations into actual voters. It’s a chase to get that ROI to turn out that voter. It’s a numbers game.

[Moderator]
What’s next? What’s the future of big data?

[Ashley Bryant]
The thing about the social/digital space is that it continues to evolve. In 2008, it was “What were the platforms?” not “How do we use them?” Our challenge was how we evolve the platform to engage the new user in new and creative ways, to find new ways to integrate these platforms into what we’re doing offline. The future depends on where the platforms go in the future. The platforms will change. The users will change. How people use the platforms will change. While social media will be impactful, we have to continue to understand the user and who is the user on these different platforms.

[Paul Morarescu]
We’re going to see more big data in political elections. In 2012, the digital team for Obama was 5 times larger than in 2008. The teams will keep growing as will the importance of the data in elections. In 2012, we went from modeling the status of the voter to changing the behavior of the voter. In 2016, we’re going to add new dimensions to the data.

Edison’s best quality as an entrepreneur was that he didn’t place all of his eggs in one basket. Instead of developing one large idea, he tinkered with many small ideas. When he successfully solved the problem he stopped working on it (and, hopefully, sold the invention). Today, an inventor might try to claim ownership of the whole telegraphy system: to require that businesses use their branded systems in order to achieve the innovations that the company had pioneered. That, however, would have required infrastructure, the managing of which would have occupied much of Edison’s time, rather than invention.